Proyas Signs up for Paradise Lost

Back in April last year I mentioned two different attempts to adapt John Milton's poem "Paradise Lost" for the big screen (see all posts). There's been precious little about those two films since then, but now what seems to be a third potential version has entered the fray. According to Variety
Alex Proyas (Knowing, Dark City) has signed up to direct the movie with Legendary Pictures. Stuart Hazeldine, Byron Willinger, Philip de Blasi and Lawrence Kasdan have all worked on the screenplay. Thomas Tull and Jon Jashni will produce with Warner Brothers involved as well. Thanks to Peter Chattaway for that.

Paradise Even More Lost

There has been the occasional bit of news about Scott Derrickson's plans to make a film version of Milton's Paradise Lost, though things seem to be progressing rather slowly. But not as slowly as they might be. The Hollywood Reporter is carrying a story that producer Martin Poll has been trying to make a movie based on the 17th Century epic poem since the late sixties.

Encouragingly, for Poll at least, it seems he's finally got someone to bite. Granite Entertainment and STV Networks have decided to team up with Poll, despite the potential competition from Derrickson's picture. And what with the release of Year One this June, there could be 3 films about Adam and Eve in theatres in the next year or so. I always find it funny how these coincidences seem to happen. 2006 saw two films released within weeks of each other about Victorian magicians. As Jeffrey Overstreet points out there were also two films about Truman Capote around the same time. I wonder if anyone will play these on a double bill when the time comes.

MTV on Paradise Lost,

The publicity machine for The Day the Earth Stood Still is starting to get up and running which gives director Scott Derrickson the chance to talk about his next project - an adaptation of Milton's Paradise Lost. Even so, the recent piece at the MTV Blog is surprisingly lengthy for a film that's not due out until 2009. The official site contains nothing more than an email address.

I'd recommend reading the whole article, but here are a couple of choice quotes to whet the appetite.

Imagine the most evil creature that ever existed, a villain who commits atrocity after atrocity, who has scarred the world and each and every creature in it, a scoundrel so heinous he makes Heath Ledger's anarchist Joker look like Mother Teresa. Now imagine that you like him.

Director Scott Derrickson says that when you see his upcoming adaptation of "Paradise Lost," the epic 17th-century poem by John Milton about the Fall of Man, you won't be able to help but have sympathy for its bad guy: the devil.

I've not read the original, but I don't think the director of The Exorcism of Emily Rose is meaning to be subversive here - he insists it's all in Milton's original work.

In the movie, Satan goes from being a completely good being [an angel] to becoming the most heinous kind of evil, and you really have a hard time knowing exactly where he crossed that line because you were with him," the director said. "What is interesting about that story, in the way Milton laid it out, is that people jump off with him at different points and some never at all. Properly done, it's a story that tells readers a lot about themselves.

"You have to respect that Milton created the first anti-hero with that poem, and certainly this was preserved in the script," Derrickson added. "At what point does love turn to jealousy, jealousy turn into hate and hate into evil?

Thanks to Jeffrey Overstreet for highlighting the article.

First Paradise Lost, NowThis?

I never quite got around to blogging the news that John Milton's Paradise Lost is being brought to the big screen by Scott Derrickson (Exorcism of Emily Rose). (Is it a Bible film? Having not read it I'm not really sure). There doesn't seem to be a great deal of information about it yet anyway. The official website(?) is very sparse indeed and whilst the IMDb page lists it as a 2007 film, it has no release dates, cast list or images related to the film. Anyone wanting to catch up on the story so far should check out the various posts at FilmChat, in particular the article at New York Times.

The latest of these is Variety's report that Disney has bought the script for another Adam and Eve themed film - All About Adam. Scott Rudin is lined up to produce the film which will follow Adam as he follows Eve to modern-day Gotham "after they have a lovers' quarrel" and "Adam discovers Satan was behind the breakup". I'm not really sure of the advantages of this film being about Adam and Eve, given the bible tells us very little about them and the context is so uniquely other as to surrender their literary significance. Perhaps there will be some form of going back in time grand finale à la Last Temptation of Christ.

Finally, I stumbled out of the cinema (having watched the excellent, if troubling, This is England) on Wednesday and walked straight past a poster advertising Paradise Lost. Surprised that it had crept up on me unnoticed I did a double take, had a closer look, and discovered that this wasn't the Milton project released early, but simply a tacky horror film. Apparently the US film Turistas has been released over here as Paradise Lost. Bizarre. Someone on the IMDb Message Board summed it up nicely: "Milton just died, again".