Alexander Payne Looks up Fox Searchlight’s ‘Descendants’

Among the favorites from the most recent the 2008 Blacklist, scribes Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (The Way Back) can open a bottle of champagne or merlot. It’s looking like the longtime actors will see Alexander Payne direct their first screenplay to make it past the in-development phase with The Descendants. Fox Searchlight had bought the rights to Kaui Hart Hemmings novel back in 07 for Payne to produce, the following year after he set up the project with the scribes, and after not being able to get Downsizing and Nebraska out of the starting blocks, decided to take on the project himself.

Production Weekly reports that filming will begin in January of next year. If all goes well, we could see the film released same time next year during Fall festival season. Set in Hawaii, the unconventional family drama tells the story of a newly widowed father — the descendant of landowners and one of the richest men on Oahu — who takes off with his two rebellious daughters to track down his wife’s lover on the island of Kauai. This one sorta sounds like a specific scene in Sideways with father-daughter strains we saw in About Schmidt.