True Detective and Beasts Of No Nation director, Cary Fukunaga, remains a hot property after the success of those aforementioned projects, but seems to use most of his current time piling up projects to be involved in rather than actually releasing anything. Here’s another to add to the heap.
Fukunaga is in advanced talks to direct a film based on Shockwave: Countdown To Hiroshima, Stephen Walker‘s non-fiction account of the days leading up to the nuclear strike. Hossein Amini – writer of Drive – is in talks to adapt the project, and it will be produced by Working Title Films.
Any film based on such a monumental event is always going to be intriguing. Fukunaga’s Beasts Of No Nation was a similarly heavy film on a smaller scale, and if he can create something similar on a macro level we might have a successful rumination on a devastating, world-altering act.
The Amazon synopsis of the book states: “A riveting, minute-by-minute account of the momentous event that changed our world forever”.
“On a quiet Monday morning in August 1945, a five-ton bomb—dubbed Little Boy by its creators—was dropped from an American plane onto the Japanese city of Hiroshima. On that day, a firestorm of previously unimagined power was unleashed on a vibrant metropolis of 300,000 people, leaving one third of its population dead, its buildings and landmarks incinerated”.
“It was the terrifying dawn of the Atomic Age, spawning decades of paranoia, mistrust, and a widespread and very real fear of the potential annihilation of the human race”.
“Author Stephen Walker brilliantly re-creates the three terrible weeks leading up to the wartime detonation of the atomic bomb—from the first successful test in the New Mexico desert to the cataclysm and its aftermath—presenting the story through the eyes of pilots, scientists, civilian victims, and world leaders who stood at the centre of earth-shattering drama”.
“It is a startling, moving, frightening, and remarkable portrait of an extraordinary event—a shockwave whose repercussions can be felt to this very day”.
Until then, Fukunaga’s Netflix series, Maniac, with Emma Stone and Jonah Hill, is what he’s scheduled to film next, between August and November, while he’s also attached to direct Stanley Kubrick‘s Napoleon project for HBO and The Black Count, an Alexander Dumas biopic. See? Piling up projects.
#Peace.Love.Fukunaga
