Peter Bratt has probably suffered for years as "the brother of Benjamin Bratt," even though he made his first feature film in 1996, Follow Me Home, that starred the likes of Salma Hayek, Alfre Woodard and, yes, his brother. He's making another run at the directing career right now as his latest film La mission travels the festival circuit, but we all know the one sure route to getting people to take you seriously: make a biopic.
Bratt will be doing just that; according to THR he's signed on to direct Silent Spring of Rachel Carson, about the environmentalist who wrote the landmark book referenced in the title, Silent Spring. The 1962 book argued against pesticides and made such an impact that Carson testified before Congress and led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Carson died in the midst of her struggle in 1964, but was recognized in 1980 with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Gail Brice wrote the screenplay from both the public record of Carson's life and her papers located at Yale. Bratt had a fairly hippy-dippyish statement to offer to THR: "Rachel Carson's prophetic work in many ways echoes the same message that native people have been trying to share with the Western world for more than 500 years: What we do to the Mother Earth, we do to ourselves." Yikes. I don't want to be the cynic who tells him he needs to tone it down in order to get any non-Greenpeace members to see the movie, but, well, the world is what it is.
