I know Kubrick really wanted to make a biopic about Napolean after 2001. I’ve heard Lynch say in interviews ever since Eraserhead when he is asked what he wants to direct next he always says “Ronnie Rocket” “about a three-foot tall guy with red hair and physical problems, and about 60-cycle alternating current electricity.”1 Ronnie Rocket was a strange mixture of the abstractness of Eraserhead and Lynch’s love of America in the fifties. He has described it as “an American smokestack industrial thing — it has to do with coal and oil and electricity”
Terry Gilliam himself had a Quixotic quest, the nightmarishness of which is documented in “Lost in La Mancha.” In spite of the director’s recent attempt to refocus his vision, we’ll likely never know whether the impossible dream would have soared magnificently or collapsed into a heap of folly and excess.
Actually tom i have heard Terry Gilliam is trying to get it back up and running.
I read, too, that he was back in preproduction with Johnny Depp, a rewrite and some recasting. It’ll be interesting to see if it finally gets made (and if it’ll even be worth seeing). I like Gilliam – even his intro to Criterion’s “Children of Paradise” – but watching his work often is akin to sticking one’s head inside a pinball machine.
You must be talking about his most recent fare. Though The Brothers Grimm was not that good, it wasn’t completely unwatchable.
Not to keep swinging off topic, but Gilliam’s Tideland was quite good…
David Lean was planning an adaptation of Nostromo when he died. I wonder if we’ll see Gilliam’s long gestating Defective Detective, or whether he’s distilled much of it into Dr Parnassus. Sergi Leone was about to sign a deal to make Leningrad (about the seige of Leningrad) when he passed away). I’d like to have seen Joe Dante’s Batman in the 1980s. Some filmmakers like Aaronofsky seem to get close to a multitude of projects (Batman, Watchmen). I would have loved to have seen Nic Roeg’s Flash Gordon (I know Hodges’ gun-for-hire take has it’s fans but I’m not one), Cronenberg’s Total Recall or Ridley Scott’s Dune (since he was still making interesting films in the ‘80s). Oh, and the Coens’ To the White Sea.
Bresson was trying to make a film based on the ‘Book of Genesis’ for many many years but he was struck by ill heath and lack of financing so it was never realised before his death … and of course Welles’ famous version of ‘Heart of Darkness’ never came to fruition as a film – it was originally to be his first film project and was to employ extensive first person point-of-view shots: “the camera eye” and voice-over narration, Welles had planned to play both Kurtz and Marlow himself.
I only know about this war movie script that Quentin Tarantino has been trying to finish for years. The title, I believe, is Inglorius Bastards. Also, wasn’t Tarantino at some point attached to Casino Royale production?
That tarantino project is in production wth Brad Pitt in the lead role. Although it is not a remake he did steal the title from a fred williamson and bo duke film titled Inglorious Bastards, i’m sure that the film was his main inspiration for his. Also he did want to direct Casino Royale but they decided he was just to big a name for the bond franchise. the dream project i would like to see is Francis Frod Coppola’s Megalapolis. (don’t know if i got the title right) (i think he’s still trying to get it off the ground)
At some point in the late 60s, Kurosawa was to be involved in a planned omnibus film with Fellini and (I think) Bergman (?).
At about the same time, Satyajit Ray wrote a screenplay for a film to be called The Alien – a gentle-tempered extraterrestrial is found in a Bengali village, and is protected by the children who live there. Peter Sellers was cast to play a British scientist in the area to investigate the matter, and perhaps locate this being before various other parties do. This was apparently set up with Warner, and Ray took up residence in L.A. for 6 months to work on the screenplay, which was widely circulated in various drafts, apparently without Ray’s knowledge. Sellers, meanwhile was pulled into various other productions, and the casting was tinkered with, and the project went into stop-start mode, with Sellers apparently getting involved again at some point late in the 1970s. Ray formally abandoned the project when Sellers died, and discussed the rise and fall of the project in Sight And Sound roundabout 1980. This is also gone into at some length in Ray’s biography – when E.T. appeared about a year later, there was a bit of controversy, and Arthur C. Clarke (Clarke was the connection between Warners, Ray and Sellers) apparently urged Ray to launch some sort of legal action, which Ray decided to not pursue.
SHANTARAM
I hope Jodorowsky gets to make another film someday; I don’t care if it’s Son of El Topo or King Shot or whatever.
Yeah, I always wanted to see Kubrick’s Napoleon biopic. I bet it would have been amazing.
And on that note, I also wish he did A.I. instead of turning it over to Spielberg. I think it would have been way cooler.
Max Ophüls wanted to make a movie based on Balzac’s “The Duchess of Langeais”. Someone said Greta Garbo was interested in playing the leading part. But nothing happened. Can you imagine the comeback of Garbo to the screen in a Ophüls movie?
Last year was realesed “Ne touchez pas la hache”, based in the same novel, and directed by the great Jacques Rivette. Lovely movie but very different of any Ophüls idea about moviemaking.
Nagisa Oshima’s planned Hollywood Zen – a biopic about Sessue Hayakawa – would have been great to see. This was derailed by first Oshima’s funding problems with it – I think it would have been a rather expensive thing to do, and then Oshima’s first stroke pretty much rendered him unable to continue with it.
Likewise, at the time of his death, King Hu was trying to set up a US film, about the experiences of Chinese railroad workers in the American west; given Hu’s skill at handling outdoor/landscape stuff, I think this could have been something incredible.
Good thread.
I don’t have much to contribute, except a lighter suggestion. I’ve always loved the X-Men series growing up, mainly when artist John Byrne came on board. I always wanted to see Byrne make an animated film of the issues he did. Or what might have been equally good is an anime version of these issues. To me, while a lot of anime has great animation, the stories are often really weak. The Claremont-Byrne issues of X-Men had some pretty strong stories that would be great film material, making the the project an ideal match.
Nellie Killian
Yesterday, I was reading about Visconti’s interest in adapting In Search of Lost Time. What a movie that might have been! Michael Powell was interested in adapting Ursala Le Guin’s Earthsea series. Martin Scorsese has realized 2 of his dream projects, Gangs of New York and the Aviator, but the third, a Dean Martin biopic has yet to come to fruition. And we have Welles’ Quixote, which was never fully realized. Dreyer was obsessed with making a movie about the life of Jesus for many of his last years, I guess Ordet wasn’t close enough.
A quick google search reveals that George Romero would love to adapt Bram Stoker Dracula and do a remake of Tarzan and the Apes. He’d also like to do a road runner and wile e. coyote-style zombie-comedy (zombedy) where you throw everything you’ve got at the zombies, but they just keep on coming.
Does anyone know of a few more of these? My romantic side is a little more taken with things like Welles’ Quixote, Dreyer’s Jesus and Visconti’s Proust, that never happened but hang heavy over the director’s career. But dream projects that might happen are interesting too. Especially if they involve a combination of Looney Tunes and zombies.