The film adaptation of Oliver Stone’s early novel, A Child’s Night Dream, will be handled by someone close to the material: Stone’s son Sean. According to Deadline, Sean is directing the project, and has refashioned Stone’s Vietnam era tale so now it takes place in a post-9/11 world. The book was written when the director was 19, and is a semi-autobiographical story about a young man who, like Stone, leaves his privileged upbringing for war. “My own high school and early college years informed the script, and helped it evolve from the time period my father set it in,” Stone the younger told Deadline of his plans for the movie. “The themes included understanding my own relationship to my parents, my first crush, and the backdrop of 9/11 and the Iraq War. My dad wrote the novel before he went off the war, and so his was a different interpretation from what he wrote later, more surreal like Apocalypose Now than Platoon. I did not go to war, so mine was not a veteran’s journey, but more one of a young man on an internal journey, coming into adulthood.”
Sean Stone’s career has been inextricably linked to his father’s, and apparently will continue to be. He appeared in his father’s films as a young actor and even made a documentary about his dad’s Alexander. More recently, he helmed the 2012 found footage horror film Greystone Park. Deadline reports the 31-year-old been working on the screenplay for A Child’s Night Dream since he was 15.