British Comedy Guide

Richard Ayoade to direct dystopian comedy The Semplica Girls

Monday 30th January 2023, 5:03pm by Jay Richardson

Richard Ayoade

Richard Ayoade is set to direct his third film later this year, a dystopian domestic comedy.

The comedian and filmmaker has adapted George Saunders's short story The Semplica Girl Diaries with the Booker Prize-winning American author.

In the dark tale, first published in The New Yorker in 2012 and still available to read on the magazine's website, an American, suburban father-of-three keeps a diary in which he alludes to a status symbol outdoor decoration called Semplica Girls.

When he buys one for his surly teenage daughter, the reader learns that these are poor young women from places like Moldova and Laos who've sold themselves as garden ornaments. At "installation", a wire is threaded through their brains and they're "hoisted up" as on a clothesline.

Last year Saunders, who won the 2017 Booker Prize for his debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, told the Maris Review podcast that he had spent part of the coronavirus lockdown "working on a screenplay with the wonderful Richard Ayoade for Semplica Girl Diaries."

Now, in an interview with the Willamette Week newspaper in Portland, Saunders has disclosed that the film is set to shoot this year.

The IT Crowd and Garth Marenghi's Darkplace star Ayoade, who will next be seen acting in Wes Anderson's adaptation of Roald Dahl's The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, alongside Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Kingsley, Dev Patel and Rupert Friend, has previously directed two feature films, 2010's coming-of-age comedy Submarine, adapted from the novel by Joe Dunthorne, and 2013's black comedy The Double, based on the novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Additionally, after writing three humorous books on film, Ayoade on Ayoade: A Cinematic Odyssey (2014), The Grip of Film (2017) and Ayoade On Top (2019), he has become a children's author, with The Book That No-One Wanted To Read published last year and The Fairy Tale Fan Club due to follow soon.

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