“Dreams of a Life” director Carol Morley is in pre-production on a feature film adaptation of her semi-autobiographical novel “7 Miles Out,” Variety has learned.
First published in 2015, “7 Miles Out” is based on the story of Morley’s troubled adolescence following her father’s suicide. It tells the story of Anne, who, after losing her father in tragic circumstances, finds solace and trouble in the Manchester music scene of the 1970s and ‘80s. The novel takes place over a seven-year time period.
Bafta nominee Morley is writing and directing the adaption while her longtime collaborator Cairo Cannon will produce through the duo’s production vehicle Cannon and Morley Productions.
The film is tentatively due to start shooting this November on location in Manchester.
Morley has previously discussed how difficult it has been to get the film off the ground, not least in having to revisit the painful memories around her father’s death. “For some reason I naively thought I wouldn’t have to do much to my book in order to transpose it for the screen and adapt it for the screen,” she told the BBC in 2023. “And I found really I began again… I don’t think one line of dialogue remains really from the book.”
The filmmaker’s credits include 2018’s “Out of Blue” starring Mamie Gummer and Toby Jones and 2014’s “The Falling,” which features Maisie Williams and Florence Pugh. She is probably best known for her 2011 drama-documentary “Dreams of a Life,” starring Zawe Ashton as a woman whose body wasn’t discovered for three years after she died alone in her apartment.
