Cate Blanchett is set to make her directorial debut with an adaptation of Herman Koch's novel The Dinner. Oren Moverman (The Messenger, Rampart) is writing the adapted screenplay. Here's the novel's official description from publisher Random House's official website.

"It's a summer's evening in Amsterdam, and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant for dinner. Between mouthfuls of food and over the polite scrapings of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of polite discourse -- the banality of work, the triviality of the holidays. But behind the empty words, terrible things need to be said, and with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened.

Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. The two boys are united by their accountability for a single horrific act; an act that has triggered a police investigation and shattered the comfortable, insulated worlds of their families. As the dinner reaches its culinary climax, the conversation finally touches on their children. As civility and friendship disintegrate, each couple show just how far they are prepared to go to protect those they love."

Caldecot Chubb is producing through his ChubbCo company, with Eva Maria Daniels and Olga Segura executive producing. It isn't known if Cate Blanchett plans to star in the film as well. The novel was first published in 2009, and has been translated into 12 languages since then.

While this project will serve as Cate Blanchett's feature film directorial debut, the actress has been directing stage plays through her position as co-artistic director of the Sydney Theater Company, alongside her husband, playwright Andrew Upton. She has directed David Harrower's Blackbird and a stage adaptation of Joan Didion's memoir The Year of Magical Thinking.