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Ang Lee will reportedly direct a movie adaptation of 'Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk'

Ben Fountain's novel about soldiers who served in Iraq has been both a critical and popular success.

Director Ang Lee (l.) will reportedly direct a movie adaptation of the novel 'Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk.'
  • By Molly Driscoll Staff Writer

“Life of Pi” director Ang Lee will reportedly helm a movie adaptation of Ben Fountain’s acclaimed novel “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.”

The 2012 book centers on Billy, who served in Iraq, and the rest of his company as they are the guests of honor at a Super Bowl in Dallas. The book was widely critically acclaimed. Monitor fiction critic Yvonne Zipp, wrote of the novel, “Fountain's debut novel, after the award-winning 2006 short story collection, ‘Brief Encounters with Che Guevara,’ is inspiring comparisons with ‘Catch-22,’ and with good reason. Fountain delivers an absurdist portrait of the war and modern society painted with brush strokes laid as precisely and as viciously as a whip." 

According to the Los Angeles Times, Simon Beaufoy of the 2008 movie “Slumdog Millionaire” is adapting the book for the screen.

"The most important thing to me is storytelling and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is a story that immediately gripped me," Lee said in a statement, according to Deadline. 

Lee was also behind such movies as the 1995 film “Sense and Sensibility,” the 2000 movie "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," and 2005’s “Brokeback Mountain."

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