Olivia Wilde, the award-winning director of the 2019 teen comedy Booksmart, will soon tell the story of a famous, real-life teenager.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Wilde will helm the upcoming film Perfect, based on American Olympic gymnast Kerri Strug’s 1997 memoir, Landing on My Feet: A Diary of Dreams, which Strug wrote with John P. Lopez. At the age of 18, Strug landed a gold-medal-winning gymnastics vault at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, despite having a severely sprained ankle. (She’d previously won a bronze medal in 1992, as part of the U.S. Olympic gymnastics team in Barcelona, Spain.)
The movie will be written by Ronnie Sandahl, who penned the screenplay for the 2017 sports film Borg vs McEnroe. No casting for Perfect has yet been announced.
Earlier this month, Wilde, who’s also an accomplished TV and film actor, won an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature for Booksmart; the movie also won several awards from critics’ associations and film festivals over the past year—although many observers expressed surprise that it wasn’t nominated for any Oscars.
Perfect appears to be Wilde’s first involvement with a book-to-screen adaptation, aside from her appearance in a 2012 PBS Independent Lens documentary, based on the 2009 nonfiction book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn. She did, however appear in a 2017 Broadway play adaptation of George Orwell’s 1949 classic Nineteen Eighty-Four.
David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.
