Actress Julia Stiles was inspired to write and direct her new short movie Raving after being accosted by a tearful stranger on the streets of her native New York.

Stiles’ film is being screened at the city’s TriBeCa Film Festival, which began earlier this week. She says, “I was walking down the street, and this girl randomly stopped me and was hysterically crying. She asked me for money, saying she just needed to get home.” I started thinking about that - what would it take to ask a stranger for money, especially if it was a lie? And I just started writing.”

The Bourne Identity star Stiles has grown to accept being stopped by strangers. She adds, “Having grown up in New York, you naturally don’t trust strangers. There’s a wall. “When you have to be more open to communicating with strangers, it’s funny. When people are hollering at you, for instance, normally I’d never turn around. “But I have to assume it’s non-threatening if someone recognises me.”

Pics: Julia Stiles at the Emporio Armani/Elle “Raving” Dinner. At The BOX in N.Y.C., April 25, 2007

Bourne bait Julia Stiles has signed up to play Esther Greenwood in an adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s classic 1963 novel The Bell Jar. Tristine Skyler, a playwright and actress whose most prominent screen credits seem to be the Dominique Swain movie The Intern and Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows, is writing the thing, and Plum Pictures is producing it. Get a load of what Plum exec. Celine Rattray had to say about the project: “Esther Greenwood has a strong outlook on life, and we’re really looking to bring out the humor in the character. We don’t want to do a depressing descent into the world of suicide.” Wow. You might want to back up and read that again. This is a book about a woman (loosely based on Plath herself) whose struggle with clinical depression is so overwhelming that it drives her to madness and leads her to be subjected to gruesome, primitive shock therapy treatments. Throughout the course of the book, she attempts suicide several times. And they’re going to turn it into, what, Mrs. Doubtfire?

The producers hope to get the project going next year, and no other cast members have been signed as of yet. Stiles will serve as a producer of the film, along with Rattray, Daniela Taplin Lundberg and Galt Niederhoffer. The story also notes that Stiles has been trying to bring this book to the screen for several years, but why? Here’s hoping that either Variety or Rattray got it wrong about the whole “uplifting” angle, which is so laughable that I’m sure the Plath estate will go bananas when they catch wind of it. The last big-screen adaptation of The Bell Jar was back in 1979.

Source via Source

Hey, I think I have those same jammies.