Diego Luna To Direct, Produce & Star In 26-Hour Mini-Series 'La Niña Mala'

In addition to being an excellent actor, Diego Luna has quietly been carving out a directorial career as well, with one feature film under his belt ("Abel") and another on the way (the biopic "Chavez"). However, his next move might his most ambitious yet.

Luna is set to direct, produce and star in an adaptation of Nobel Prize-winning author Mario Vargas Llosa's "Travesuras de la niña mala" (or "The Bad Girl" in English). And this won't simply be your standard book-to-movie work, as Luna is taking it to television for a mini-series that will stretch out over twenty-six one-hour episodes. Damn. Of course, we reckon he'll rotate out with some other helmers, but who knows? Maybe he's feeling savvy enough to wear all the hats and do it himself.

Certainly, the material is intriguing. Described as a story that has touches of "Vertigo" and "Last Year At Marienbad," the story concerns a translator and his obsession with a girl he met when he was 14 years old, who he continually tries to win over. Here's the book synopsis from Amazon:

Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl. He loves her as a teenager known as "Lily" in Lima in 1950, when she flits into his life one summer and disappears again without explanation. He loves her still when she reappears as a revolutionary in 1960s Paris, then later as Mrs. Richardson, the wife of a wealthy Englishman, and again as the mistress of a sinister Japanese businessman in Tokyo. However poorly she treats him, he is doomed to worship her. Charting Ricardo's expatriate life through his romances with this shape-shifting woman, Vargas Llosa has created a beguiling, epic romance about the life-altering power of obsession.

No word yet on when the tele-novela style show will get underway, who else might join or even if the Mexican television production will find its way north of the border. But we'll be keeping an eye and ear out. [Variety]