The First Look at the Film Adaptation of Donna Tartt's "The Goldfinch"

If you made it through the nearly 800 pages it takes to finish off Donna Tartt’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Goldfinch, you probably thought either

1. That was great.

2. The middle part of that book was a bit of a slog, but I still enjoyed it overall.

3. I’d like to see that turned into a movie, but I’d really love to see Tartt’s first book, The Secret History, get the long-overdue film treatment first.

So the bad news is that the third one probably isn’t happening anytime soon. The good news is that the adaptation of The Goldfinch is out this September, and it’s directed by John Crowley, who has had a few successes with literary adaptations in his career. Also, with a cast including Nicole Kidman, Sarah Paulson, Luke Wilson, Ansel Elgort and Jeffrey Wright, it’s fair to say there’s some serious weight behind making the movie version as successful as the book it’s based off of. So how do they plan to pull it off? Offering up a first look at the film over at Yahoo, Crowley says, “The initial decision to not follow the linear structure of the book, rather to intercut a little more cinematically, a little more impressionistically, that was the thing that liberated us and allowed us to deal with time passing and leave out chunks of the book which though beautiful and wonderful in their intentional setting were perhaps less dramatic.”

Yahoo! also offered up a first look at the film with a picture of Kidman and Elgort holding hands in a living room. It isn’t much to go on, but the best nugget is when asked if Tartt offered up any advice on how the film should look, Crowley admitted that he only met the author once, and that she never made it to the set during filming.

“She was busy,” Crowley said of the reclusive Tartt.