A movie about Dracula without vampires! Thank you Brad Pitt

12 December 2009

Gerard Wood

EW.com recently interviewed actor Charlie Hunnam (Cold Mountain, Sons of Anarchy) about his first writing and producing gig, a sweeping historical biopic about Vlad the Impaler, the fifteenth century inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula. It's taken three years to get the script to this stage, but the project now appears to be gaining momentum with Brad Pitt's Plan B production company and Summit Entertainment (yes, the film studio responsible for Twilight) picking it up, with music video director Anthony Mandler rumoured to direct. Mandler's pitch to the studio was apparently inspired by Zack Snyder's 300, although Hunnam wryly suggests that in writing the script he laboured "a little bit more over the history than 300 did".

Which thankfully means no bloody vampires (no pun intended)! This was a non-negotiable point of principle for Hunnam when developing the script, which he crafted as a historical epic more in the vein of Braveheart than 300. Hunnam's interest is "the reality of how this man turned into the myth, and because of some of his behaviours, it's actually very easy to weave that mythology in, in a true way." While the movie may not be pitched as a fantasy or horror, you can bet that it will be horrific and bloody if it is at all to be historically authentic given Vlad's brutal reputation.

Set at a time when the Islamic forces of the Ottoman Empire were expanding across the Danube into Christian Wallachia, the ancestral home of the Dracul family, the movie presents the life story of Vlad from his childhood as a hostage in the Ottoman Court, to his bid for freedom and life-long conflict with the vastly superior Ottoman forces (superior in terms of numbers and technology that is). While Hunnam is not an apologist for Vlad's brutality (impaling his enemies on pikes for instance), he does seem to be providing a context for Dracula's infamous excesses:

"...you can clearly see the things that Bram Stoker took.... Vlad was such a brutal man, and the trick is to make him sympathetic. That was the challenge, and if we've succeeded in any way in this script, I truly believe that it's genuinely making him sympathetic. He was doing what he thought was right. He was the one who was being invaded and whose religious beliefs were being stripped away. Vlad met the Sultan three times in battle through the course of his life and at any time he met him, he was outnumbered 5 to 1. A lot of his brutality just came out of military necessity - shock tactics and fear tactics to give him the upper hand, because he just couldn't meet them man-to-man. Gunpowder had also just been discovered, so Vlad was fighting with bows and arrows and swords and the Ottoman Empire had guns. He had the advantage of fighting on home ground and he knew the terrain better, which gave him the ability to fight at night. Because he would fight at night, he would try to get his men on a night schedule, so they hadn't already been up for 12 hours through the day. There are a million ways to show that this guy is the origin of vampirism without actually having him drinking blood."

No actors have been attached to the project as yet, although Hunnam mentions Colin Farrell in passing: "There's something very roguish and bad boy about Vlad, and I know Colin a little bit, and I think he has some of the characteristics that would be essential for playing this guy."

While there have been numerous  adaptations of Bram Stoker's novel and a seemingly endless stream of spin-offs, there have been few attempts to bring the historical story to the screen. Most notable is Vlad Tepes (1979), a nationalist Romanian film directed by Doru Nastase at a time when Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was in power and Vlad the Impaler was being venerated as a national icon.

All'n'all this sounds like a really interesting project, although I'm not convinced that Farrell would be right for the role (I still can't rid myself of the memory of Alexander although Farrell did redeem himself somewhat with In Bruges). And once more (Neuromancer) we have an unproven movie director in the driving seat  of what is essentially a genre movie and, more worryingly, a newbie director who seems intent on emulating Zack Snyder rather than giving us something original. Hopefully Anthony Mandler will prove me wrong.

You can read the full interview from EW.com here.

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