In the betting stakes for what project the veteran filmmaker
Michael Mann might direct next - advantage has just gone to his adaptation of
Bernard Cornwell's Agincourt (announced
back in October) and that is music to my ears.
Screen Daily reports that
Luc Roeg's (son of Nic) production company Independent has just confirmed out in Cannes that Mann will direct Agincourt for the company with
Benjamin Ross (RKO 281 helmer) currently re-writing and finishing up the script that Mann and
Michael Hirst (The Tudors, Cate Blanchett's Elizabeth films) had been working on. From the author of the Sharpe novels, Agincourt is centered on a skilled archer whose impending execution is cancelled when King Henry V is impressed by his marksmanship. Its a good old fashioned epic swords-and-shields flick with a love story at its core and which builds up to the 1415 bloody battle of Agincourt as its finale. Basically, it will be the kind of picture Ridley Scott has been making with Russell Crowe this last decade and would mark Manns largest scale film since
The Last of the Mohicans. Sounding particularly confident, Roeg says the film has significant momentum and they hope to soon go out to studios for full financing (psssst - give
Megan Ellison a call) - with a shoot in France and the U.K. likely. Perhaps this could be as early as this year but one suspects it won't be till 2012 before the camera's start rolling on this one. Very, very exciting news. I loved how Mann captured how the 1930's Chicago-gangster era WOULD have had actually looked like with his use of the very modern day and accomplished HD cameras and not the nostalgic, dimmed look that we usually see in gangster films. Will he bring this technique to a medieval war era? Of course he will... and I will love him for doing so.