Birdsong: An epic in the making
This is the story of a blockbuster movie that hasn't been made (yet); a film that, if it lives up to its potential, should carry us all away with its sweeping historical narrative and tragic romantic undertow. Imagine a British Dr Zhivago – an intimate epic about love and war, about coming of age and disillusionment, about sexual rapture and the squalor of mass slaughter. It's a film that the millions of readers who savoured the novel on which it is based can already picture vividly in their minds.
The story of this proto-blockbuster has an all-star cast – Ewan McGregor, Ralph Fiennes, Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley, Eva Green and Jake Gyllenhaal. As for directors who have come and gone from the project, the roll-call is no less stellar: Joe Wright, Sam Mendes, Peter Weir, Michael Mann, Roger Michell, Paul Greengrass, Justin Chadwick and Rupert Wyatt. And the writers who have flirted with the project include a Nobel Prize winner.
Over the past 16 years, hundreds of thousands of pounds have been spent on commissioning scripts, optioning and re-optioning the source material, hiring lawyers and scouting locations. There are no particular heroes or villains from this epic process. This isn't a cautionary Hollywood parable about some faceless Hollywood studio calling the shots. It's an everyday tale of the British film industry, where projects not infrequently spiral off into some development hinterland whence they struggle to emerge.
The film enduring such a long and tortuous journey toward the big screen is Birdsong, an adaptation of Sebastian Faulks's hugely successful novel which, since its publication in 1993, has sold more than three million copies and been ranked 13th in the BBC's "Big Read" survey to discover the nation's best-loved book.
Birdsong tells the story of Stephen Wraysford, a young Englishman first seen in Amiens in 1910 where he is staying with a local family, learning about the textile industry. Stephen has an affair with a married woman, Isabelle Azaire, and elopes with her, but she eventually returns to her family. From pre-war France, the book takes us to 1916, with Stephen an officer in the British Army during the Battle of the Somme. There are also sections set in the late 1970s, dealing with Stephen's granddaughter's investigations into her family's past. It is a book that comes with all the ingredients that ought to make for a rousing movie: love, lust, intrigue and the human catastrophe of the First World War...
Read entire article at Independent (UK)
The story of this proto-blockbuster has an all-star cast – Ewan McGregor, Ralph Fiennes, Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley, Eva Green and Jake Gyllenhaal. As for directors who have come and gone from the project, the roll-call is no less stellar: Joe Wright, Sam Mendes, Peter Weir, Michael Mann, Roger Michell, Paul Greengrass, Justin Chadwick and Rupert Wyatt. And the writers who have flirted with the project include a Nobel Prize winner.
Over the past 16 years, hundreds of thousands of pounds have been spent on commissioning scripts, optioning and re-optioning the source material, hiring lawyers and scouting locations. There are no particular heroes or villains from this epic process. This isn't a cautionary Hollywood parable about some faceless Hollywood studio calling the shots. It's an everyday tale of the British film industry, where projects not infrequently spiral off into some development hinterland whence they struggle to emerge.
The film enduring such a long and tortuous journey toward the big screen is Birdsong, an adaptation of Sebastian Faulks's hugely successful novel which, since its publication in 1993, has sold more than three million copies and been ranked 13th in the BBC's "Big Read" survey to discover the nation's best-loved book.
Birdsong tells the story of Stephen Wraysford, a young Englishman first seen in Amiens in 1910 where he is staying with a local family, learning about the textile industry. Stephen has an affair with a married woman, Isabelle Azaire, and elopes with her, but she eventually returns to her family. From pre-war France, the book takes us to 1916, with Stephen an officer in the British Army during the Battle of the Somme. There are also sections set in the late 1970s, dealing with Stephen's granddaughter's investigations into her family's past. It is a book that comes with all the ingredients that ought to make for a rousing movie: love, lust, intrigue and the human catastrophe of the First World War...