Vera Farmiga To Direct 'Higher Ground'

Vera Farmiga quickly broke into the big time. Her early credits came in the late '90s, and by 2004 she was working with Jonathan Demme (his Manchurian Candidate remake) and then there was The Departed. Up in the Air landed her an Oscar nomination, and she's continuing to work in movies that aren't quite mainstream: Henry's Crime, Madonna's W.E. (which sounds more intriguing with each nugget of info) and Duncan Jones' Source Code.

Now she'll make her directorial debut with Higher Ground, in which she'll also star.

Production Weekly's twitter feed is the original source of this info. As such, we don't have a lot of other info. The film will be based on This Dark World, a memoir by Carolyn Briggs. The script is by Briggs and Tim Metcalfe, and production is slated to begin in New York state this June.

Here's the book synopsis:

Carolyn Briggs grew up with modest means in the Iowa heartland. Pregnant at seventeen, married a few months later, by the age of eighteen she found herself living in a trailer with no plans beyond having more babies-until she found Jesus. It began innocently enough-a few minutes lingering on the televangelist stations, a cursory look at the Bible-and soon she had wholly given herself over to a radical, apocalyptic New Testament church. Her daily life was permeated with a sense of the divine-she spent hours a day in prayer and Bible study, wore modest clothing, even braced herself for the Rapture every time she heard trumpet music over the supermarket loudspeaker. It was only when her marriage began to unravel that Carolyn dared to question the religious dogma she had embraced for all of her adult life to date.

Farmiga is too old to play the character from her late teen years, so I'd expect the film might pick up later in her life and use flashbacks with a different actress to illustrate those early days.