Director Steve Jacobs is adapting Disgrace, an adaptation of J.M. Coetzee's novel from a script by his partner, the actor Anna-Maria Monticelli, according to Production Weekly. It is based on the Booker Prize-winning novel by South African Coetzee and sees John Malkovich playing a disgraced university professor.

Set in post-apartheid Cape Town, the film takes as its complex central character 52-year-old English professor whose preoccupation with Romantic poetry - and romancing his students - threatens to turn him into a "a moral dinosaur".

After years teaching Romantic poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, David Lurie, middle-aged and twice divorced, has an impulsive affair with a student. The affair sours; he is denounced and summoned before a committee of inquiry.

Willing to admit his guilt, but refusing to yield to pressure to repent publicly, he resigns and retreats to his daughter Lucy's isolated farm. For a time, his daughter's influence and the natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonize his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. He and Lucy become victims of a savage and disturbing attack which brings into relief all the faults in their relationship.

Production is scheduled to begin this January.