Michael Mann's Next Film Project will be either BIG TUNA or AGINCOURT
Since Public Enemies came out, director Michael Mann has been hard at work developing a new series on HBO called Luck, with Dustin Hoffman and Nick Nolte. Once he's finished with this HBO project he will jump on board and direct one of two films that he's currently looking at taking on. One is a gangster movie, the other is a period epic. Which ever one he decides to take on is fine because they both sound awesome!
The gangster movie is called Big Tuna, the story of Tony Accardo and his successor, Sam Giancana. Antonino "Joe Batters" Accardo also known as "Big Tuna", rose from small-time hoodlum to the position of day-to-day boss of the Chicago Outfit criminal organization ca 1943, to ultimately become the final Outfit authority in 1972, until his death. Accardo moved The Outfit into new operations and territories, greatly increasing its power and wealth during his tenure as boss. Giancana joined the Forty-Two Gang, a juvenile street crew that answered to political boss Joseph Esposito. Giancana soon developed a reputation for being an excellent getaway driver, a high earner, and a vicious killer. After Esposito's murder, in which Giancana was allegedly involved, the 42 Gang transformed into a de facto extension of the Chicago Outfit. In 1945, after serving a sentence at the Federal Correctional Complex, Terre Haute, Indiana (during which time he told his children he was away "at college"), Giancana made a name for himself by convincing Outfit boss Tony Accardo to stage a take-over of Chicago's African-American "policy" (lottery) pay-out system for The Outfit.
The period film Mann is looking at is called Agincourt, which is based on Bernard Cornwell's book of the same name, a bestselling novel that focuses on a young man with a death sentence on his head who is saved when his skills with the bow catch the attention of king Henry V. The archer develops into a warrior and falls in love with a young woman whose virtue he saved from a lecherous priest, and he becomes the portal to the bloody Battle of Agincourt, made famous by Shakespeare's Henry V.
Here's the official description of the book:
An extraordinary and dramatic depiction of the legendary battle of Agincourt from the number one historical novelist Agincourt, fought on October 25th 1415, on St Crispin's Day, is one of the best known battles, in part through the brilliant depiction of it in Shakespeare's Henry V, in part because it was a brilliant and unexpected English victory and in part because it was the first battle won by the use of the longbow - a weapon developed by the English which enabled them to dominate the European battlefields for the rest of the century. Bernard Cornwell's Azincourt is a vivid, breathtaking and meticulously well researched account of this momentous battle and its aftermath. From the varying viewpoints of nobles, peasants, archers, and horsemen, Azincourt skilfully brings to life the hours of relentless fighting, the desperation of an army crippled by disease and the exceptional bravery of the English soldiers.
Like I said, both of them sound good, but I'd like to see him take on Agincourt. He hasn't done a period film since Last of the Mohicans. Which one of these stories would you rather see Mann bring to the big screen next?