“Mr. Turner director Mike Leigh will return to the 19th century for his next film, currently titled Peterloo, a drama about the infamous Peterloo Massacre of 1819,” reports Andreas Wiseman for Screen. “The notorious massacre, now widely taught in UK schools, saw British government forces charge into a crowd of 60,000 that had gathered in St Peter’s Field in Manchester to demand political reform.” Says Leigh: “Apart from the universal political significance of this historic event, the story has a particular personal resonance for me, as a native of Manchester and Salford.”
“Lars von Trier, who last autumn, in his first interview for three years, said he had stopped drinking and was going to AA meetings, also worrying about whether he would be able to make films again when sober, is back at work,” reports Jorn Rossing Jensen for Cineuropa. Von Trier is currently writing The House That Jack Built, “an eight-part English-language television series about a serial killer, as seen from the murderer’s point of view.”
Michael Mann is “in final development stages” on his “long-gestating” biopic of Enzo Ferrari and “eying a 2016 shooting date for the extensively researched pic, based on Brock Yates’s 1991 book Enzo Ferrari: The Man, the Cars, the Races, about the man who redefined the high-powered Italian sports car and almost single-handedly created Formula One racing.” Variety‘s Nick Vivarelli stresses that this is a different Ferrari biopic than the one Robert De Niro’s committed himself to, claiming, as reported last week by the Guardian‘s Ben Child, that it “has absolute priority over all my other projects.” Child notes that, back in the 90s, De Niro had been attached to Mann’s movie.
Sight & Sound editor Nick James has visited the set of Gabe Klinger‘s Porto, Mon Amour (working title), which “centers on a life-changing one-night encounter in Porto between Jake [Anton Yelchin], a young American expatriate, and Mati [Lucie Lucas], a slightly older French woman, and takes three approaches to that experience. It begins with a three-minute section shot in Super 8 which maps out the entire lives, birth to death, of the two characters, then continues with a 30-minute section shot in 16mm covering 15 years of their parallel and intersecting lives. The remaining hour, shot in 35mm ’Scope, focuses on that one passion-filled night.”
Ryan Gosling is in negotiations to star in Denis Villeneuve‘s sequel to Blade Runner, reports Deadline‘s Mike Fleming Jr. “The story takes place several decades after the conclusion of the 1982 original.” As for what else Gosling’s up to, he’s slated for Guillermo del Toro’s The Haunted Mansion, “circling with Emma Stone the Damien Chazelle-directed Lionsgate pic La La Land and next will be seen in Shane Black’s The Nice Guys opposite Russell Crowe and in Terrence Malick’s Weightless. He is in production on The Big Short, starring opposite Christian Bale, Brad Pitt and Steve Carell.”
Fleming also reports that Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman are teaming up to turn David McCullough’s book The Wright Brothers into a series for HBO.
Screen‘s Jeremy Kay reports that Cary Fukunaga’s next television series (after True Detective) will be The Alienist, based on the novel by Caleb Carr. It “takes place in late 19th century New York as Dr Laszlo Kreizler enlists the help of newspaper reporter John Moore and police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt to track down one of the city’s first serial killers.”
Fans of Steven Soderbergh’s The Knick will want to follow the Season 2 Production Journal.
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