During recent press rounds for his upcoming drama Last Days, director Gus Van Sant spoke briefly to SciFi Wire about his next project The Time Traveler's Wife, an adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger's best-seller.

[The film] will focus on the central relationship. "Telling the story is very hard, too, but it's the chemistry with a film [that matters most]," Van Sant (Psycho, Finding Forrester) said in an interview. "You can tell with ones that don't work. They're doomed from the start. You can just tell. And that's just interpreting chemistry, which is scary but a challenge."

Time Traveler's Wife is loosely based on the Odyssey and centers on the relationship between a woman and a man with a time-traveling gene that enables him to leapfrog to different periods in her life. "I think it's a really nice book, and it's a departure from what I've been doing recently," Van Sant said while promoting his latest film, the drama Last Days.

Van Sant said that he was intrigued by the central relationship in Niffenegger's novel. "I find the diagram of their relationship is really nice and well done," he said. "And if I can pull it off it'd be really nice, because it's hard to do. It's hard to cast, because, in some ways, I think, a love story is ... it's almost like, when you see the two people on screen, it's already happened. They're there. And that's the hard part, to get there already."

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