Lulu Wang to helm live-action Audition starring Lucy Liu and Charles Melton for LAIKA and Higher Ground

Hollywood needs to battened down the hatches in preparation for a gathering of power players on their way to the silver screen. According to reports, the Obamas’ Higher Ground Productions and LAIKA will join forces for a live-action feature adaptation of Katie Kitamura’s Booker Prize-longlisted novel Audition. The high-profile project finds Lulu Wang (The Farewell, Expats, Touch) in the director’s chair, with Lucy Liu (Chicago, Kill Bill: Vol. 1, Charlie’s Angels) and Charles Melton (Warfare, The Sun is also a Star, May December) leading the cast.

Lulu Wang will direct Audition from a script by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Martyna Majok (Preparation for the Next Life, Cost of Living). Higher Ground and LAIKA will produce alongside Wang’s Local Time studio.

Here’s a synopsis for Kitamura’s page-turning novel, courtesy of Amazon:

“Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.”

President Barack Obama is already a fan of Kitamura’s novel after including Audition on his 2025 Summer reading list, which he publishes annually alongside his favorite albums and musical artists. In his list, Obama describes Kitamura’s book as a “quiet novel about the ways we hide our true selves from others – and ourselves.”

Lulu Wang’s latest project was the Prime Video series Expats, starring Nicole Kidman, Sarayu Blue, and Ji-young Yoo. The mini-series examines the personal and professional lives of a tight-knit group of expatriates living in Hong Kong. In 2019, Wang directed the exceptional family drama The Farewell, starring Awkwafina, Shuzhen Zhao, and X Mayo. The powerful coming-of-age film focuses on a Chinese family who discovers their grandmother has only a short while left to live and decides to keep her in the dark, scheduling a wedding to gather before she dies.

Is Lulu Wang the right director to bring Audition to screens? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.

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