Sam Mendes set to direct Gay Talese’s The Voyeur’s Motel

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Now that Sam Mendes is officially done with the James Bond franchise, he can turn his attention to other projects, and according to Deadline, the filmmaker will helm THE VOYEUR'S MOTEL, an adaptation of Gay Talese's recently published New Yorker article and upcoming book of the same name.

If this ends up being Mende's next feature film directorial effort it'll be his first non-Bond flick since 2009's AWAY WE GO. Mendes will also produce the DreamWorks movie with Steven Spielberg.

The Voyeur’s Hotel is a long and rather unsettling piece in which a Colorado man named Gerald Foos, a lifelong voyeur, opened a hotel primarily so he could watch guests having sex, through ceiling vents. He fancied himself as an observer of human behavior, but he sometimes did more than observe. Among other things, he was complicit in a murder he caused when he flushed the drugs of a dealer down the toilet and that dealer blamed his girlfriend and strangled her.

Foos first contacted Talese anonymously in 1980 after hearing about his nonfiction novel Thy Neighbor's Wife, and eventually gave the author permission to tell his peeping Tom tale.

Foos on why he purchased the hotel:

The reason for purchasing this motel was to satisfy my voyeuristic tendencies and compelling interest in all phases of how people conduct their lives, both socially and sexually…I did this purely out of my unlimited curiosity about people and not as just a deranged voyeur.

Mendes and DreamWorks just acquired the screen rights to the story, and there's also no word on who will be writing the script, so it's probably going to be awhile before we hear any casting news, but which actor would you like to see play Foos in THE VOYEUR'S MOTEL?