John Green's 'Paper Towns' Finally Has A Director

Three key elements of the upcoming adaptation of the John Green novel Paper Towns have been on the table for months, announced even before the adaptation for Green's The Fault In Our Stars hit (and dominated) theaters: Fault In Our Stars screenwriters Michael H. Weber and Scott Neustadter would be returning in screenwriter capacity, Green would be joining the team as a producer, and Fault In Our Stars supporting actor Nat Wolff would be starring as Q, the teenage boy whose point of view the novel was told from. Now, finally, the film has the key element that will allow it some forward momentum: Jake Schreier will be directing Paper Towns .

The announcement came via Green's twitter on Thursday:

EXCITING ANNOUNCEMENT: The Paper Towns movie will be directed by the brilliant [Jake Schreier], who previously made Robot and Frank.

Robot and Frank — which starred Frank Langella as a man with a robot friend and also featured Susan Sarandon, Liv Tyler, and James Marsden — is Schreier's only feature directoral gig, but it's got an 86 percent frsh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, if those metrics matter to you.

Selfishly, what's most exciting about the naming of a director for Paper Towns is that this means the film can finally grow legs and get moving. We've had Wolff cast as Q for quite a while, but he's only half of the story's two main characters — Margo Roth Spiegelman's a vital role, and with a director tapped her casting actually has a chance of happening sooner rather than later.

The narrative and themes of Paper Towns constitute a pretty tricky balancing act — it's a story Green's admitted to telling as a way to combat the idea of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl and all her magicalness, a sort of disillusionment as told through the eyes of the boy who'd misimagined her. In other words, Schreier's got his work cut out for him. The fact that he's a relatively untested director leaves a lot to be nervous about, sure — but that kind of newness could also be freeing for a project like this. The fact that Green's calling the script "amazing" doesn't hurt either.