According to NME, Toni Collette’s directorial debut “The Best Of Adam Sharp” is one of 42 productions to share in Screen Australia’s $1.6million of Development Funding announced yesterday. 14 feature films, eight online projects and 20 television dramas received the latest funding round, the last awarded in the 2019/20 financial year. Collette’s The Best Of is a romantic comedy based on Graeme Simpson’s book of the same name, and is set to be adapted for screen by comedian and writer Mark Watson. Per a synopsis, the film “follows amateur musician turned IT specialist Adam Sharp who has a stable, unexceptional life with his matter-of-fact wife Claire”. “When his first love, Angelina, gets in touch with an offer of reuniting, Adam must choose between the fantasy of a life unlived and the reality of his marriage in its quiet beauty”. In response to a Mediaweek article announcing the film, Watson tweeted the film is “still 11 steps from actually getting made”, joking that he shared it anyway because “what’s the use of being strung along by this business if you can’t occasionally look good to your mum”.

Yet another new project for Toni on the horizon which, once again, sounds very intriguing. According to Deadline, Toni Collette has just optioned the novel and screenplay The Best of Adam Sharp from red hot author Graeme Simsion who also penned The Rosie Project set up over at Tri-Star. Adam Sharp, which is kind of a High Fidelity for 40-somethings, is one of the first that Collette has brought to her newly formed production company Vocab Films. Her producing partner is Jen Turner. The Best of Adam Sharp (published via St. Martin’s Press) is about a man (Adam) on the cusp of fifty who is restless as his marriage has gone stale. He can’t quite forget a romance he had twenty years ago with an intelligent and strong-willed woman named Angelina Brown who taught him what it meant to find—and then lose—love. He wonders how different would his life be if he hadn’t let her go. Out of the blue, he gets a one word email from Angelina. He responds and his life takes a significant turn. Collette will play the lead female role, Angelina.