99 Homes’ Ramin Bahrani to direct HBO’s Fahrenheit 451 adaptation

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

According to The Wrap, 99 HOMES and AT ANY PRICE filmmaker Ramin Bahrani has been hired by HBO to write and direct an adaptation of the classic Ray Bradbury novel Fahrenheit 451. Bahrani will also executive produce the project with Alan Gasmer and Peter Jaysen.

Bradbury's dystopian tale has only been adapted once for the screen, back in 1966 by director François Truffaut, however it has influenced numerous writers, as well as a number of movies, including Kurt Wimmer's EQUILIBRIUM.

Book synopsis, for those of you who didn't read it in high school:

Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden.

Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television.

When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known. He starts hiding books in his home, and when his pilfering is discovered, the fireman has to run for his life.

Who would you like to see star in Bahrani's take on the novel?