Oscar and IFTA nominated director John Boorman (Deliverance, Excalibur, The Tiger’s Tail) is set to film long awaited project ‘Memoirs of Hadrian’, which follows the life of the Roman Emperor most famous in the UK for building the wall that separated England and Scotland.
The UK’s Handmade Films will finance the €30 million - €40 million project, which Boorman has been trying to get off the ground for ten years. Rome-based Olympus Films will co-produce, while Handmade Films’ chairman Patrick Meehan, Olympus Films’ Enzo Peri and Boorman are casting the lead role. Peri previously acquired the rights to Marguerite Yourcenar's bestselling novel ‘Memoirs of Hadrian’, on which the film is based.
Brit director Boorman, who has been based in Ireland since the early 1980’s, will co-write the script along with Rospo Pallenberg, who previously penned Boorman’s King Arthur epic ‘Excalibur’ and ‘The Emerald Forest.’
The long mooted project is now finally underway to coincide with the British Museum's Hadrian exhibition, ‘Empire and Conflict’, which looks at the period from 117 to 138 A.D. when Hadrian ruled over a Roman empire that spanned much of Europe, Northern Africa and the Middle East.
Handmade Films Intl. will be handling worldwide sales on ‘Hadrian’.
The film begins shooting in Spring 2008 in Morocco, Rome and Spain.