Damien Chazelle’s screenwriting oeuvre is roughly 50 percent young people pursuing their artistic dreams, 50 percent unspeakable horror threatening to descend at any moment. (2013’s Grand Piano is basically both within the same film.) The La La Land director might be preoccupied with bringing Ryan Gosling to the big screen as Neil Armstrong in next year’s biopic First Man, but Variety reports that Chazelle’s screenplay for his mystery-thriller The Claim has been optioned by Oceanside Media. Motion Picture Capital will fund the project, which will reportedly see release in 2018. Selected for 2010’s Black List, The Claim follows “a single father with a criminal background who must uncover the whereabouts of his kidnapped daughter while fighting the mysterious claims of another couple who insist that the child is theirs.” Odds that said kidnapped daughter has a burgeoning love of, let’s say, marimba or tap dance? Oh, we think you know the answer to that.
