Even though Ben Affleck is busy shooting Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, he’s still moving forward with his next directorial endeavor, his adaption of the Dennis Lehane novel, Live By Night. Affleck just recruited Sienna Miller, Zoe Saldana and Elle Fanning to star in the film, which tells the story of Joe Coughlin’s experience going from petty theft in Boston in the 1920s to climbing the organized crime ladder.
Affleck adapted the book himself and will also produce alongside Appian Way’s Jennifer Killoran Davisson and Leonardo DiCaprio. Hit the jump for more on Miller, Saldana and Fanning’s roles in the film.
According to Deadline, Miller is on board to play a character named Emma, the women Coughlin falls for towards the beginning of the book who also happens to be his mob boss’ girlfriend. Saldana will take the role of Graciella Suarez who Coughlin crosses paths with later on when he makes the move to the organized crime scene in Tampa. And lastly, Fanning’s character is Loretta Figgis, an aspiring actress who gets herself into some trouble. Apparently that one was a much sought after role.
Live By Night was originally scheduled for a Christmas 2015 release, but Warner Bros. opted to push it back to October 17, 2016 due to the Batman v Superman delay. The Deadline article makes no mention of a Live By Night start date, but if they’re casting up now, it’d make sense for Affleck to move into this one after Batman v Superman wraps up.
Here’s the official synopsis of the book, Live By Night:
Boston, 1926. The '20s are roaring. Liquor is flowing, bullets are flying, and one man sets out to make his mark on the world.
Prohibition has given rise to an endless network of underground distilleries, speakeasies, gangsters, and corrupt cops. Joe Coughlin, the youngest son of a prominent Boston police captain, has long since turned his back on his strict and proper upbringing. Now having graduated from a childhood of petty theft to a career in the pay of the city's most fearsome mobsters, Joe enjoys the spoils, thrills, and notoriety of being an outlaw.
But life on the dark side carries a heavy price. In a time when ruthless men of ambition, armed with cash, illegal booze, and guns, battle for control, no one—neither family nor friend, enemy nor lover—can be trusted. Beyond money and power, even the threat of prison, one fate seems most likely for men like Joe: an early death. But until that day, he and his friends are determined to live life to the hilt.
Joe embarks on a dizzying journey up the ladder of organized crime that takes him from the flash of Jazz Age Boston to the sensual shimmer of Tampa's Latin Quarter to the sizzling streets of Cuba. Live by Night is a riveting epic layered with a diverse cast of loyal friends and callous enemies, tough rumrunners and sultry femmes fatales, Bible-quoting evangelists and cruel Klansmen, all battling for survival and their piece of the American dream. At once a sweeping love story and a compelling saga of revenge, it is a spellbinding tour de force of betrayal and redemption, music and murder, that brings fully to life a bygone era when sin was cause for celebration and vice was a national virtue.