Some time back, Stephen Daldry was attached to direct an adaptation of Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, with Scott Rudin set as the producer. Later on, Chabon said the project went south for "studio-politics kinds of reasons that I'm not privy to." Well, the project may have life left in it, as Daldry told Ain't It Cool News.

Speaking to Daldry at a junket for The Reader, the director said that he was still hopeful that Paramount would put the film back into production, and that as far as he was concerned, he was still attached as director.

Daldry talked a bit about the challenges of adapting the novel to film, since the novel covers nearly thirty years of time, and integrates both the lives of the writers and their comic-book creations. "...How much you use the comic books and how much you don't." Daldry said. "How much is animated? Do you use animation? How do you use animation in comic books? What's the difference between the two? That was one of our big discussions. I spent a lot of time with different animators exploring ways to animate comic books."

Chabon's novel focuses on the lives of two young men who create a superhero known as the Escapist. The novel focuses on their personal struggles in creating the character, the paths their lives take, the legal issues involved in creating comic book superheroes, and wraps them all in the environment of a country at war. The parallels between Kavalier and Clay and Superman creators Shuster and Siegel are obvious to many hard-core superhero fans, and have become increasingly well-known as time goes on. The fact that Siegel and Shuster's issues with the creation of Superman are currently receiving so much attention makes Daldry think that now is perhaps the perfect time to bring The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay to the screen.

"Maybe it's a good time to remind people who wrote them and who created them and why they were created," Daldry said. He continued "And how central they were to a generation of immigrants coming to the United States from Europe and what the superhero was originally speaking to and speaking about."