Details on Hailee Steinfeld's 'Sleeping Beauty'

A little overa year ago, no one knew whoHailee Steinfeldwas. Plucked from obscurity after an exhaustive search through over 15,000 young girls, now 14-year-old Steinfeld is the critically-acclaimed breakout star of the latest Coen brothers film,True Grit, with an Oscar nomination to prove it.

Naturally, the offers came. Paramount closed a deal in February to work with Steinfeld again onForgotten, a novel adaptation about London Lane, a teen girl whose memory is erased every night. When she awakes each morning, her past is a blank slate but she’s able to“remember” her future and the relationships that shape her life, except for a mysterious boy that doesn’t factor into her visions of the future, just as she’s plagued by disturbing flashbacks.

Now Steinfeld is attached to another project, one that nestles squarely into Hollywood’s newest fascination: fairy tales.

The young starlet is attached toThe Sleeping Beauty, a spec script written by Lindsay Devlin that re-imagines the classic story of the slumbering princess.Deadlinereports the package is being shopped around to studios, who have become enamored with re-tellings since Tim Burton’s billion-dollarAlice in Wonderland. Curious why Steinfeld would attach herself as a lead that might spend screen time counting sheep, I read Devlin’s script.

In Devlin’s undated draft, Princess Rosamond is introduced as an infant, a blessing to her father, the King, and his beautiful wife, the Queen-Consort. Until the arrival of Settyana, the King’s scorned step-daughter who possesses unspeakable powers of black magic. As revenge for her father’s transgressions, she curses Rosamond to“die by a prick to the finger by her eighteenth birthday.” The curse is hastily reduced to a 100-year sleep by a magical ally, but the damage has been done.

For nearly eighteen years, Rosamond is sheltered from harm by the King’s royal mandate, though she develops a lasting relationship with Eston, a humble gardener. When the inevitable occurs, Rosamond is plunged into a mystical dreamworld of fantastic creatures, including a soaring gryphon, a rhino/sloth creature, an imp helper, and a horde of ice trolls.

In the dreamworld, Rosamond wanders the darkened land searching for clues to free her from the curse, much like the bizarreAlice in Wonderlandor, more accurately, Ridley Scott’sLegend. On the surface, Eston journeys into Settyana’s enchanted realm to rescue the princess and save the kingdom from her nefarious plot to overthrow the King.

While tonally uneven— a youthful focus with an unflinching attitude towards death— Devlin’s script is well-paced and true to its source material (with a few twists of its own), a rather engrossing outing for a screenwriter with no produced credits. I’m already jaded with fairy tale updates, but an imaginative filmmaker could certainly spin this into a memorable re-telling, particularly with such a capable lead in Miss Hailee Steinfeld.

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