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Mike Nichols in Talks for 'One Last Thing Before I Go' for J.J. Abrams

by Ethan Anderton
April 25, 2013
Source: THR

It's been seven years since director Mike Nichols gave us the sorely underrate Charlie Wilson's War starring Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman, but now it sounds like the veteran director of The Graduate might finally be getting back behind the camera. THR has word that Nichols is in early talks to direct an adaptation of Jonathan Tropper's novel One Last Thing Before I Go, a project set up at Paramount Pictures with J.J. Abrams producing through his Bad Robot banner. This comes hot on the heels of Shawn Levy's forthcoming adaptation of Tropper's This is Where I Leave You, starring Tina Fey.

Here's the official synopsis of the book:

You don’t have to look very hard at Drew Silver to see that mistakes have been made. His fleeting fame as the drummer for a one-hit wonder rock band is nearly a decade behind him. He lives in the Versailles, an apartment building filled almost exclusively with divorced men like him, and makes a living playing in wedding bands. His ex-wife, Denise, is about to marry a guy Silver can’t quite bring himself to hate. And his Princeton-bound teenage daughter Casey has just confided in him that she’s pregnant—because Silver is the one she cares least about letting down.

So when he learns that his heart requires emergency, lifesaving surgery, Silver makes the radical decision to refuse the operation, choosing instead to use what little time he has left to repair his relationship with Casey, become a better man, and live in the moment, even if that moment isn't destined to last very long. As his exasperated family looks on, Silver grapples with the ultimate question of whether or not his own life is worth saving.

With the wedding looming and both Silver and Casey in crisis, this broken family struggles to come together, only to risk damaging each other even more. One Last Thing Before I Go is Jonathan Tropper at his funny, insightful, heartbreaking best.

This sounds like the perfect character driven film to get Nichols back behind the camera, so I hope this turns into a done deal quickly. This wouldn't be the first time Nichols has worked with J.J. Abrams. Before the Star Trek director became the master of sci-fi and mystery we know today, he wrote Regarding Henry, the 1991 film starring Harrison Ford that Nichols directed. Funnily enough, that film came after Nichols directed Postcards from the Edge, a film written by none other than Carrie Fisher, based on her own book. So that's a fun little bit of Star Wars trivia for you that won't ever help you in life.

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