Universal Focus has made a deal with the estate of Ernest Hemingway to turn "To Have and Have Not" into a thriller that will star Benicio Del Toro, reports Variety.
Tod "Kip" Williams ("The Adventures of Sebastian Cole") will write the script and direct the film, which Del Toro will produce with Laura Bickford.
Even though they'll be contemporizing Hemingway's story of a charter boat captain who gets in deep with smugglers, the filmmakers will stick much more closely to the book than did the 1945 Howard Hawks-directed Warner Bros. adaptation.
That pic marked the first pairing of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and was dramatically reinterpreted to be more like "Casablanca" than Hemingway's prose. That distinction allowed the current filmmakers to go directly to the author's estate, because WB only holds remake rights to that picture.
In "To Have and Have Not," Del Toro will play a fisherman in the Florida Keys who isn't making enough money to feed his family and out of desperation becomes involved with unsavory smugglers. It is likely that the Caribbean will be the focal point of the smuggling.