Following the success of Conor McPherson's Girl From The North Country – an award-winning musical, which originally premiered in 2017, and features the songs of Bob Dylan – a film adaptation is now on the way.

According to Variety, the film will star Chlöe Bailey, Olivia Colman and Woody Harrelson, with McPherson writing and directing.

Set in Duluth, Minnesota in the 1930s, Girl From The North Country was the Dublin playwright's first play not set in Ireland.

“I set it in the 1930s, and to me, it felt like the world was going back to that place at the time,” he told Hot Press last year, at the time of the musical's 3Olympia Theatre run. “It feels, sadly, like it’s resonating with what’s happening in the world now. There’s more and more division and hardship. Nobody ever seems to learn from history. People seem to relate to the universality in it.”

“It was a sheer pleasure working on Bob [Dylan]’s music and being able to rearrange the songs for our band," he continued. "The music in the show is used almost the way music is used in a movie. It creates an emotional climate for the story to happen, rather than providing you with narrative facts.”

Girl From The North Country features classic Dylan songs such as 'Like A Rolling Stone', 'Make You Feel My Love', 'Hurricane', and 'Forever Young'. Though the musical was praised by Dylan, its 2020 Broadway run was disrupted by the Covid pandemic.

The film adaptation is being backed by Blueprint Pictures – who were also one of the production companies behind The Banshees of Inisherin – with executives Graham Broadbent and Pete Czernin serving as producers.

Read our full 2022 interview with Conor McPherson here.