David Fincher to take on CLEOPATRA?
Angelina Jolie's Cleopatra biopic is still trying to get off the ground. Sony Pictures is still currently looking for a director to take on the project. Both James Cameron and Paul Greengrass were circling the project, but neither one worked out. Cameron started work on his Avatar sequels, and Greengrass went on to make his Martin Luther King film, Memphis.
The studio is now interested in bringing on director David Fincher to bring this story to life on the big screen. The studio obviously wants a high profile director for this film project, I can only imagine it's a very ambitious script.
The film will be based on the Stacy Schiff book Cleopatra: A Life. The studio is looking to shoot the film in 3D from a script written by Bran Helgeland, which was described as a "brilliant script deserving of epic treatment" all about "what the Romans took from Egypt".
Everyone involved with the project believes that Jolie was born to play this part. How can you argue? There's no doubt in my mind that Jolie could end up pulling of the definitive Cleopatra performance. Here's what Jolie had to say about Cleopatra and playing her,
I will play it differently to Elizabeth Taylor, but I could never be as lovely as she was. We are trying to uncover the truth about her as a leader and not just a sex symbol which she really wasn't -- she didn't have many lovers, maybe only two, and they're men she had children with. She was misunderstood and her life story was written wrongly. I always thought her life was very glamorous. Then I read her story and found a different side to her - that she was a mother, leader and an intellect who spoke five languages! Her upbringing also reflected her relationship with Rome -- all that is much more interesting than what she was summed up to be.
David Fincher is one of my favorite directors, his films have always been on the incredible side. I would love to see what he would do with a film like Cleopatra. The big question is… will he chose to do it?
What do you all think about Fincher possibly directing this film?
Here's description of the book that the movie will be based off of:
The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer brings to life the most intriguing woman in the history of the world: Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt.
Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnets, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator.
Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first when both were teenagers. She poisoned the second. Ultimately she dispensed with an ambitious sister as well; incest and assassination were family specialties. Cleopatra appears to have had sex with only two men. They happen, however, to have been Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, among the most prominent Romans of the day. Both were married to other women. Cleopatra had a child with Caesar and--after his murder--three more with his protégé. Already she was the wealthiest ruler in the Mediterranean; the relationship with Antony confirmed her status as the most influential woman of the age. The two would together attempt to forge a new empire, in an alliance that spelled their ends. Cleopatra has lodged herself in our imaginations ever since.
Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Shakespeare and Shaw put words in her mouth. Michelangelo, Tiepolo, and Elizabeth Taylor put a face to her name. Along the way, Cleopatra's supple personality and the drama of her circumstances have been lost. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Schiff here boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order. Rich in detail, epic in scope, Schiff 's is a luminous, deeply original reconstruction of a dazzling life.