Two-time Academy Award winner Ben Affleck has started production on his next directorial outing, the Dennis Lehane novel adaptation Live By Night. Today, Affleck has turned to social media, sharing the first shot from the Prohibition-era tale. Check it out in full below!
Part of Lehane’s “Joe Coughlin” series, Live By Night was published in 2012 with the following official description:
Boston, 1926. The ’20s are roaring. Liquor is flowing, bullets are flying, and one man sets out to make his mark on the world.
Prohibition has given rise to an endless network of underground distilleries, speakeasies, gangsters, and corrupt cops. Joe Coughlin, the youngest son of a prominent Boston police captain, has long since turned his back on his strict and proper upbringing. Now having graduated from a childhood of petty theft to a career in the pay of the city’s most fearsome mobsters, Joe enjoys the spoils, thrills, and notoriety of being an outlaw.
But life on the dark side carries a heavy price. In a time when ruthless men of ambition, armed with cash, illegal booze, and guns, battle for control, no one—neither family nor friend, enemy nor lover—can be trusted. Beyond money and power, even the threat of prison, one fate seems most likely for men like Joe: an early death. But until that day, he and his friends are determined to live life to the hilt.
Joe embarks on a dizzying journey up the ladder of organized crime that takes him from the flash of Jazz Age Boston to the sensual shimmer of Tampa’s Latin Quarter to the sizzling streets of Cuba. Live by Night is a riveting epic layered with a diverse cast of loyal friends and callous enemies, tough rumrunners and sultry femmes fatales, Bible-quoting evangelists and cruel Klansmen, all battling for survival and their piece of the American dream. At once a sweeping love story and a compelling saga of revenge, it is a spellbinding tour de force of betrayal and redemption, music and murder, that brings fully to life a bygone era when sin was cause for celebration and vice was a national virtue.
Affleck also stars in Live By Night. He’ll play the Coughlin role alongside Elle Fanning, Sienna Miller, Zoe Saldana, Chris Messina and Chris Cooper.
Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Davisson Killoran and Jennifer Todd will produce Live By Night alongside Affleck, who also adapted the screenplay. Warner Bros. Pictures will release the film in theaters on December 31, 2017.
