Emilio Estevez is a man I respect and admire as a filmmaker. I loved his second directorial effort, MEN AT WORK. It was just a lot of fun. But it was his movie, BOBBY (2006), that changed the way I viewed him as a director. That movie showed Hollywood that this teenage star from the 80s was all grown up and ready to be an adult.

I’m thrilled to announce that I learned this morning Emilio has two movies coming out that he directed; one’s already complete, and the other is currently in production. The first, called THE WAY, follows “an American who travels to France to reclaim the body of his estranged son, who has died in a storm on his way to the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route. Once in France, the father cremates his son’s remains and decides to complete the pilgrimage.” That American will be played by his father, Martin Sheen. This marks Emilio’s fourth feature as a writer-director. He’s currently shopping for a distributor at the Berlin Film Festival, and has high hopes this will tap into the same audience who saw (and liked) THE BLIND SIDE.

The second feature has just greenlit called THE PUBLIC, a “story loosely based on a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece written by Chip Ward, a retiring librarian in Salt Lake City, which discussed the epidemic issue of libraries becoming de facto shelters for the homeless and the mentally ill in light of many social program cuts… [THE PUBLIC] takes place during a 48-hour period on the two coldest days in the city, with the library overwhelmed by people seeking shelter. After getting rebuffed by the administration to keep the doors open, one librarian stages an act of civil disobedience. He ends up dealing with the library’s new inhabitants, many of them mentally ill.” The story inspired Emilio after reading it in a newspaper. No casting announcements have been made at the moment.

Source: Variety, via The Playlist/ THR, via Coming Soon