why Phil Noyce?!

well..recently he was in south africa shooting the film Hotstuff. this film is about the apartheit era that affected thousands of black people for the struggle to freedom.. from what i have seen on this film..rushes etc. Its damn good. but i dont wanna judge a book by its cover. let him try. and well if that dfoesnt work. well mayb bean 2 will work :-P ONLY KIDDING

He also did a fairly good job with Graham Greene's Quiet American. I think he cut his teeth with thrillers (you forgot to mention Sliver and Patriot Games), but he probably wants to move on to something more meaningful. Don't forget, the same man who gave us Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jaws, and Jurassic Park also gave us Schindler's List and The Color Purple, not to mention winning two Oscars.

I'm actually surprised that no one is talking about the fact that a non-American is making a movie about a book that is widely regarded as one of the best American novels ever written. I haven't read the novel yet, so I can't comment about it. Is an outsider's perspective what this movie needs, or is Philip Noyce already "American" enough to tackle the subject?

The only second chance you get is to make the same mistake twice. - David Mamet

This is one of the best novels of the last century, after the mess Noyce made of "The Quiet American" he should not be allowed near it.

As an Australian I may well be biased, but I'm delighted to hear Phil Noyce is making this film. His version of "The Quiet American" was a masterclass in adaptation. It struck a perfectly nuanced balance between political themes and human characterization, and that’s precisely what Roth’s novel achieves, too. That skill is actually Noyce’s stock in trade. Sure, he’s directed his share of big-budget Hollywood crap, but foreign viewers might not be aware that Noyce cut his teeth on some legendary Australian period pieces such as “Newsfront” and the mini-series “The Dismissal” and “The Cowra Breakout”. He also co-wrote a mini-series about Vietnam. All of these projects are renowned for their sense of capturing historical moments of cultural and political significance and yet instantiating them in the lives of credible characters. This is exactly what Roth does in the novel (in many of his novels, actually), so I think Noyce is a great match for this project. Does it matter that Noyce isn’t an American who lived through the Swede’s time in America? Only if you doubt the human capacity for creativity. If directors, or writers for that matter, limited themselves to documenting only the times or places they lived in, then our arts would be unnecessarily impoverished. I’m sure Spielberg’s Jewishness contributed in some way to the magic of “Schindler’s List” – but don’t forget the Booker Prize-winning novel on which it’s based was written in Sydney by an Irish-Australian who trained as a Catholic priest. He'd never set foot in Poland until after he began writing that book. Yet none of that undermines his or Spielberg's capacity to bring a specific milieu to life, nor for the film to be embraced as emblematic of a particular moment in our cultural history.

I'd love to see Ang Lee take on this film. He's a director who has proven himself adept at navigating this thematic terrain- most notably with "The Ice Storm". Noyce is talented enough, though even his more personal films like "The Quiet American" are overlayed with elements of the action and thriller genres, which don't really fit "American Pastoral".

Ewan McGregor has replaced Noyce... http://deadline.com/2015/02/ewan-mcgregor-american-pastoral-director-r eplacing-philip-noyce-1201376012/

WUT?

Apparently it took 10 years to get this to the screen, and now the star, Ewan McGregor, is also directing. I don't know how this came about, but I am certainly willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. And the fact that he is not "American" doesn't bother me, especially given his wonderful All-American performance in "Big Fish."


"SEDAGIVE?"

Maybe he is branching out.