Stephen Frears and Christopher Hampton stay they are struggling to get their previously announced adaptation of Jonathan Coe’s novel Mr Wilder & Me off the ground, but still hope to work together on the project.
“We’d like to make it happen but it’s a difficult time for finding money,” Oscar-nominated The Queen director Frears said of the project first announced in 2024.
He was speaking to Deadline ahead of receiving a life-time achievement award alongside Hampton at the SCAD Lacoste Film Festival in France’s Provence region this weekend, followed by an open-air screening of their 1988 classic Dangerous Liaisons which won three Oscars including Best Writing for Hampton.
Coe’s novel unfolds against the backdrop of Hollywood director Billy Wilder’s struggles to get his penultimate movie Fedora off the ground. Hampton said the previously announced cast of Christoph Waltz, Maya Hawke, John Turturro and Jon Hamm remains intact for now, but like Frears he suggested financing was proving elusive.
The filmmakers also have a raft of separate film projects on the boil.
Frears revealed he is awaiting a screenplay by Stephen Beresford for a biopic about Chariots of Fire and Ghandi actor Ian Charleson.
The celebrated Scottish film and screen actor, who was regarded as one of the brightest lights of his generation, died at the age of 40 from AIDS in 1990, and asked that the cause of his death be publicized to promote awareness and acceptance of the illness.
Screenwriter and filmmaker Hampton, who also won a Best Screenplay Oscar for The Father, has a dozen projects on the go.
Notable among these are The Noise of Time, a biopic about Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich to be directed by Polish filmmaker Jan Komasa and Anne Fontaine’s movie exploring the relationship between feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Nelson Algren.
Elsa Zylberstein has signed for the role of de Beauvoir in the latter movie, and the hunt is now on for an actor to play Chicago-based Algren, per Hampton.
Further movies in development include Embers, a big screen adaptation of his 2006 stage play adapted from Hungarian writer Sandor Marai’s 1942 novel, to which István Szabo is attached, and a long-gestated movie version of his 1993 stage musical version of Sunset Boulevard.
Hampton also revealed that he is revising his 1985 stage play for Dangerous Liaisons ahead of a production at the National Theatre next year, directed by Marianne Elliott with Aidan Turner, Lesley Manville, Monica Barbaro, and Gabriella Drake in the cast.
“Looking at it again now, there are a few things that need attention,” said Hampton, without detailing the changes.
The honorary awards and the Dangerous Liaisons screening was a highlight of the SCAD Lacoste Film Festival in France’s Provence region over the weekend.
Rumors that the movie’s co-star John Malkovich might put in an appearance proved unfounded, but this did nothing to dampen a lively Q&A with Frears and Hampton on their quest to bring Dangerous Liaisons to the big screen.
The pair regaled SCAD students with their oft-told story about how they were in a race against Miloš Forman, after he announced he was also making a film based on the novel, which would result in his production Valmont.
“It’s always good to have other people making the same film,” said Frears. “It puts a rocket up your arse.”
Hampton said their decision to cast American actors – with Malkovich joined by Glenn Close, Glenn Close, Michelle Pfeiffer, Keanu Reeves and Uma Thurman – rather than the cast of the hit stage production led by Alan Rickman, meant they were on and off transatlantic flights.
“We did a lot of work on planes because the whole thing was such a tremendous rush,” he recounted. “Every trip we made, we did quite a lot of work going through the script… breaking it down a bit.”
They once found themselves on same flight as UK producer David Puttnam, who was chairman and CEO of Columbia Pictures at the time.
“He said, ‘I’m so jealous of you. You look like you’re having such a good time’,” said Frears.
Hampton added that Puttman had advised them to cut a key scene at the Paris opera towards the end of the film.
“It was terrible advice… trust nobody,” said Frears.
“Especially an executive,” quipped Hampton.
The fourth SCAD Lacoste Film Festival ran June 26 to 28, kicking off the Savannah College of Art & Design’s summer semester at its campus in the hilltop village of Lacoste in France’s Luberon Valley.
In a quirk of history, Lacoste is also the site of the Chateau of the Marquis de Sade. Some literary experts have suggested the aristocrat’s notorious exploits may have served as inspiration for Dangerous Liaisons author Pierre Choderlos de Laclos as he set out to write his then scandalous 1782 epistolary novel.
Regardless of whether the theory is correct, Close’s performance as libertine plotter Marquise de Merteuil opposite Malkovich as arch seducer Vicomte de Valmont played out on the big screen against the silhouette of Sade’s Castle.
Open-air screening of Dangerous Liaisons against backdrop of Lacoste
Courtesy of SCAD
