Robin Williams' daughter is stepping into the director's chair.
Zelda Williams is gearing up to make her directorial debut! Robin Williams' only daughter has been tapped to direct Lady Frankenstein, a Focus Features film starring Kathryn Newton and Cole Sprouse, ET confirms.
In the film, which is set in 1989, an unpopular high schooler accidentally re-animates a handsome Victorian corpse during a lightning storm and starts to rebuild him into the man of her dreams using the broken tanning bed in her garage.
Academy Award winner Diablo Cody wrote the script, and will serve as a producer on the project alongside Mason Novick. Jeff Lampert will be an executive producer for the film, while Focus Features’s Vice President of Production and Development, Michelle Momplaisir, will serve as the creative executive on the project.
Williams tweeted about the news on Wednesday, writing, "Zomb-com incoming! I repeat, zomb-com incoming!"
"I know Hollywood gets a bad rep for regurgitating sequels and remakes and reboots over and over and over… and yeah, it totally does that!" she added in a follow up tweet. "But it’s also finally letting me make the most bonkers, wonderful zombie script I’ve ever read, and for that, I will be forever grateful!"
In a third tweet, Williams addressed the fact that Lady Frankenstein will mark her feature-length directorial debut, writing, "For anyone coming here to be like 'THIS is your first feature?!', it wasn’t meant to be. I had three films fall apart before this, because movies often do. It was discouraging, to say the least. But the fact this one survived and THRIVED to be my first? A f**king gift."
As for the flick itself, Williams teased, "This movie is a stylized 80s & involves a zombie. It is NOT reality and doesn’t pretend to be. Stylistically, the actors are NOT teens but are playing teens (and an undead guy) because that was how many of my fave 80s movies were."
ET spoke with Williams at the Tribeca TV Festival in September 2018, and the filmmaker opened up about how her late father's advice on acting helped guide her career.
"It was always be kind, work very hard. I think the concept of ego has kind of taken over for a lot of people in our industry where they think what they’re presenting has to be a particular thing for them," she said at the time. "And truthfully, you’re not your audience, so all that self-consciousness and all that -- it gets in the way of you actually just being the best thing in whatever thing that you’re doing."
Principal photography for Lady Frankenstein is slated to begin later this summer.
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