The Lost City Of Z de James Gray

Voilà c'est le prochain projet de James Gray, avec Brad pitt, qui produit également le film.
C'est un projet qui s'écarte vraiment de ce qu'à pu faire James Gray jusqu'à maintenant ne serait-ce que par le fait que le film se déroulera en partie en Amazonie (et au début du siècle) et pas dans sa chère ville de New-York, personnage presque à part entière de tous ces films.

Le film racontera l'histoire de Percy Fawcett (personnage historique) cartographe britannique, envoyé en amazonie afin de d'établir la frontière entre la Bolivie et le Brésil, mais celui-ci va entreprendre une aventure folle à la recherche d'une cité mystérieuse dans les profondeurs de la forêt amazonienne, l'El Dorado...il y disparaîtra à jamais.

James Gray parle de son projet :

Citation :

Director James Gray talks LOST CITY OF Z
2/8/2009

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Written
by Steve 'Frosty' Weintraub


Sometimes real life can be as exciting as a movie. At least if your
name was Percy Fawcett.

You see, back in the
early 1900’s, Fawcett traveled to South America
working as a cartographer for the British government. His goal was to
settle some land disputes as an impartial third party. But soon after
completing his work, he became obsessed with some of the local legends
like the existence of El Dorado.
He also spent a lot of time in the jungles where he discovered
creatures never before seen in the western world…such as giant
anacondas. In fact, so unbelievable were his findings that when he
eventually returned home and reported them, he was ridiculed by the
scientific community.

Not only did Fawcett work
as a cartographer, he fought in the Battle of the Sum in World War I and
interacted with the leaders of his time, like Winston Churchill and
Archduke Ferdinand. He was a sort of real life “Forrest Gump” - except
he lived in the early 1900’s. And wasn't retarded.

His story is fascinating
and he’s actually one of the real life inspirations for “Indiana Jones"
so it should be no surprise that his life story might also be made into a
movie, with Brad Pitt, who has played larger-than-life characters like
Achilles and Jesse James, possibly playing the part.

At the recent “Two
Lovers” press day, director James Gray said in a roundtable interview
that Brad had sent him an article in The New Yorker about Fawcett’s
story. James is currently writing his first draft and when he’s done,
he’ll be sending it to Brad. The way James was talking, if Brad likes
the script, they would make the movie together.

Of course this is Hollywood, things
change as frequently as the wind blows, which means until they start
filming, don’t count on anything.

Question: And you’re
attached to a film called “The Legend of Z”?

James Gray:
Oh, the “Lost City of Z”. Yeah, yeah, yeah. With Brad
Pitt, yeah.


What can you tell us
about that?

James Gray:
It’s totally different from anything I’ve done. It’s
of unbelievable ambition. I love Brad for that
reason. He does not lack for ambition. And he had sent me the article from The New Yorker by a
guy named David Graham, about a guy named Percy Fawcett who was sent to
South America to….you know people don’t realize what recent
history….the mapping of the world is recent history. The
last hundred years or so, or at least the accurate mapping of the world
obviously. So, the British had sent this man
down to South America to mediate a border dispute between Bolivia and Brazil because the rubber
trade was huge back then. 1905-1906. Because BF
Goodrich and the invent of the automobile. So the
borders were not clearly delineated.

They needed somebody—a 3^rd
party—to chart the borders correctly so that Bolivia and Brazil wouldn’t argue
anymore about who had what. And he went down
there and rather quickly lost his appetite for mapping, which he did
with wonderful success, but he quickly became aware of the possible
existence of El Dorado, the city of gold and a lost civilization in the
jungle and he became obsessed with archeological issues and to be direct
about it went quite mad. The story is quite
sprawling. He went back to fight in WWI where he
was injured in the Battle
of the Sum. Basically he was attacked with chlorine gas and eventually
went back to the Amazon and brought his son with him to finish the
exploration to find this lost city. They
disappeared. They were never seen again. It’s a
fantastic story. I mean, it’s unbelievable. And I think it has the potential to be something
really quite powerful. I’m about ¾ of the way
through the 1^st draft of the script now and I’m going to give
it to Brad when I’m done in probably about another 2 months I’d say.

When Brad came to you,
did you have to kind of stop and say and figure out what you visually
could bring to it because it’s so different from what you’ve done?

James Gray:
I didn’t because the story meant a lot to me. I’m very
interested in history and I’m very interested in an economic approach to
history. I don’t want to say Marxist because
obviously Marxism is absurd in the way to organize the world. It’s ridiculous. But in the way
of looking at the world as a form as historical analysis, it bears some
scrutiny. I mean, it’s certainly interesting. And the idea itself of civilization—the civilized
world—is almost ridiculous. And the idea that
everyone had called the….or the indigenous population…I almost don’t
want to use the word Indian because of what that really means…and the
indigenous population of the Amazon….they’re savages,
they’re savages. Well, they’re basically savages
because the Spanish and the English and everybody else went down there
and essentially forced them into slave trade and treated them horribly. So when they saw a white man they quite reasonably
had a violent response. It’s self-preservation. And the only time that this man really got injured
was in WWI and the Battle
of the Sum. I don’t know if you know about this. It’s literally like the end of the civilized world.
It’s the thing that made the Geneva Convention because the British had
brought 2 regiments of Indian troops from India
on horseback—Calvary. And
they would fit gas masks on the heads of the…this will all be in the
movie of course, on the heads of the horses to gallop out of the
trenches to get machine gunned. It’s was
insanity. So what interested me was not even the visual aspect at first. What interested me entirely was a narrative idea
about a person who was at a certain quest about a lost civilization.

It fueled, at least in
part, with his disappoint about what his civilization had produced. A certain obsession with class distinction anyway. So I loved the story. The
story itself was great and the visual aspect of it, that comes for me 2^nd
or even 3^rd. It’s not the primary
thing I think about…which is maybe a flaw, I don’t know.
But it’s certainly not what I think about initially. What I think about initially because I feel like if
you want to be a narrative filmmaker, which is what my dream is, the
narrative muscle needs to be engaged first. The
storytelling. I think that story is a wonderful and lost art. Somebody
told me last night that MIT was literally creating a program to teach
story because they thought respect for story had become degraded, which I
found really interesting and weird. I’m majoring
in story. What does that mean? But
story is transformative and quite beautiful and so that’s the story
itself is what drove me in kind of the edible bizarre twist that he
brought his 18 year old son with him in the end. And
they were never seen again.

Sounds like you’re
thinking about a real-world history approach.

James Gray:
That’s what I’m trying to do. You know, Indiana Jones
was based him. Of course it’s a totally different
Republic B serial’s approach to the character and doesn’t bear any
resemblance finally, but that’s who he sort of was the basis for Indiana Jones. And the stuff in the book is unbelievable, like I
mean falling off the raft and starting to get eaten by piranhas. And he literally was the first person in western
civilization to discover the Anaconda. They
didn’t believe him. He said I saw a 30-foot snake
that was eating deer. People thought he was
making it up.

Sounds like Herzog.

James Gray:
The Wrath of God. You know wandering
through the desert…the jungle and all of a sudden hearing opera and
thinking you’ve gone mad, and guess what you’ve reached the clearing and
there’s a fucking opera house in the middle of the jungle that the
Portuguese have built 150 years before. I mean,
it’s madness but it’s great. Aguirre is a
masterpiece I think and I’m going to try my hardest not to rip it off.
It is really hard because it is a masterpiece. And
I don’t think I will rip it off because it involves a lot of European
history as well in a way that is not really connected to Ageara. Ageara is in it’s enclosed, oneric, beautiful way. Quite different. I mean a big
set piece in this movie about 2/3 of the way through will be the Battle
of the Sum , which I’m hoping I can do in a way that other people have
not. I don’t know, I’ve been doing research on
it. It’s just like hell on Earth.
It’s awful.

I assume he will be
disfigured for part of this film too, right?

James Gray:
No, he was not disfigured. What happened
was he was a crazy person. He literally began to….he was put in charge
of 700 men and the generals came….and he was almost like Forrest
Gump….everybody he ran…..and Winston Churchill he came in contact with
and Archduke Ferdinand he was in contact with in Sri Lanka. He was one of those guys who was always connected
somehow to major figures and Churchill came down to the trenches and
said “a major problem—all of you have your hands in your pockets and as
soldiers you should be behaving for the King” and everybody’s like “what
are you talking about? We’re getting like
mustard gas dumped on us” So anyway he finally was ordered not to try to
take a particular territory. He said, fuck it. I’m going to be brave and he led these 700 guys and
he wasn’t directly, physically injured except that he inhaled chlorine
gas and scarred his lungs. And he began to have
this horrible cough which became progressively worse.

http://www.collider.com/entertainment/interviews/article.asp/aid/10842/tcid/1

Yep j'attends ce film,même si j'ai l'impression que ça dure un peu longtemps.Enfin quand je vois le temps qu'a mis Gray entre chaque film c'est pas trés étonnant

Intéressant

James Gray pourrait tourner Lost City Of Z plu tôt que prévu:

Citation :

L'adaptation du roman de David Grann The Lost City of Z pourrait débuter plus tôt que prévu. Le film sera réalisé par James Gray (Two Lovers, La nuit nous appartient, The Yards). Le réalisateur américain et Brad Pitt auraient trouvé un financeur au marché du film à Cannes. Le tournage pourrait débuter dès que Brad Pitt sera libéré du tournage de Moneyball de Bennett Miller.

Le film retracera l'épopée de l'explorateur britannique Percy Fawcett, égaré en Amazonie, à la recherche de la mystérieuse cité Z. Cette ville aurait disparu en 1925. De nombreux explorateurs ont tenté de retrouver la trace de Z, sans succès. Nous avons hâte de voir comment James Gray va pouvoir se tirer de cette histoire aux accents d'Indiana Jones et d'Aguirre, la colère de Dieu. Le film sera produit par Brad Pitt(via sa boîte de production Plan B). Inferno Entertainment (Southland Tales) pourrait se charger de la distribution.

http://www.excessif.com/cinema/actu-cinema/news/james-gray-pourrait-tourner-the-lost-city-of-z-plus-tot-que-prevu-5857923-760.html

enfin ça bouge

Curieux de voir ça en plsu le agrs est assez intéréssant

Citation :

Ce nouveau film du réalisateur de Two Lovers et La nuit nous appartient est l'adaptation du roman de David Grann, sorti en France en mars dernier. Il retrace les aventures d'un explorateur britannique Percy Fawcett, égaré en Amazonie, à la recherche de la mystérieuse cité Z. Une ville disparu en 1925 et qui est recherché depuis sans succès. Le tournage devrait démarrer dès que Brad Pitt sera libéré de celui de Moneyball de Bennett Miller.

http://www.excessif.com/cinema/actu-cinema/news/brad-pitt-explorateur-pour-james-gray-5869524-760.html

Citation :

James Gray tournera "Lost City of Z" avec Brad Pitt cet
automne












Annoncé il y a deux ans, le projet de
film du réalisateur de Two lovers se confirme, avec Brad Pitt
en tête d'affiche.







Resté dans les cartons pendant deux ans, le projet Lost city
of Z de James Gray se concrétise enfin. Pour la première fois de
sa carrière, Brad Pitt rejoindra bien le sombre univers du réalisateur
américain (Two lovers, La nuit nous appartient).


L’acteur endossera le rôle de Percy Fawcett, un explorateur anglais
qui disparut au coeur de la jungle amazonienne en 1925 alors qu'il était
à la recherche d'une cité perdue datant de l’Atlantide. Sa disparition
reste aujourd’hui encore un mystère.


James Gray a lui-même écrit le scénario de ce film, son
cinquième, adapté de l’enquête La Cité perdue de Z du
journaliste et écrivain américain David Grann, publiée en mars dernier.


Le tournage devrait commencer à la fin de l’été, probablement en
Amérique du Sud, quand Brad Pitt aura terminé Moneyball, la
comédie de Bennet Miller. L’acteur coproduira le film via sa société
plan B aux côtés de Paramount Pictures.


Agenda chargé pour la superstar hollywoodienne qui devrait aussi
bientôt tourner dans le prochain long-métrage de Darren Aronofsky, The
Tiger. James Gray, de son coté, planche aussi sur un remake des Liens
du sang de Jacques Maillot.

http://www.lesinrocks.com/cine/cinema-article/article/james-gray-tournera-lost-city-of-z-avec-brad-pitt-cet-automne/

croisons les doigts pour que ce soit pour cet automne comme ils disent

Sur le livre de David Grann, l'article nous apprend encore quelques détails intéressants sur Fawcett :

Citation :

La Cité perdue de Z, la quête du colonel Fawcett


Par Jérôme Dupuis, publié le 03/05/2010 à 12:00













Un journaliste du New Yorker
ressuscite le destin tragique du "Livingstone de l'Amazone" parti à la
recherche d'une mystérieuse cité. Documenté et haletant.


Il a servi de modèle au héros du Monde perdu, de Conan
Doyle, a inspiré à Hergé le personnage de Ridgewell, le barbu à la
sarbacane de L'Oreille cassée, a attiré Bob Morane dans la
jungle et a fasciné aussi bien Hemingway que T. E. Lawrence : le colonel
Fawcett (1867-1925), le "Livingstone de l'Amazone", incarne jusqu'au
bout des guêtres le gentleman-explorateur à l'anglaise. Il fut une
immense star de son temps. Dans un livre ultradocumenté et haletant,
David Grann, journaliste au New Yorker, ressuscite la figure de
cet aventurier obsédé toute sa vie durant par l'existence d'une cité
mythique au coeur de l'Amazonie, où vivrait un souverain couvert de
poudre d'or. Le fameux El Dorado, nom de code : "Z".Après avoir
été espion au Maroc pour le compte de Sa Très Gracieuse Majesté, Percy
Harrison Fawcett découvre l'Amazonie le jour où il est chargé de tracer à
la machette la frontière entre la Bolivie et le Brésil. Ce membre
éminent de la Société royale de géographie fait partie de ces pionniers
qui comblent les taches blanches sur les cartes - activité qui nous
paraît ô combien romanesque à l'heure de Google Earth. Il va être
littéralement envoûté par l'enfer vert - anacondas, anguilles
électriques, flèches au curare des Indiens, moustiques, moustiques,
moustiques... Dès lors, ce puritain de fer multiplie les expéditions
vers cette mystérieuse cité perdue, même si la moitié de ses hommes
périssent en chemin.En 1925, inquiet de voir un concurrent
survoler l'Amazonie en hydravion, le colonel fait financer par
Rockefeller le périple qui doit les mener, lui et son fils, enfin
jusqu'à "Z". Cet obsessionnel du secret refuse de confier à son épouse
le point de la carte où il souhaite se rendre. Cela le perdra. Père et
fils disparaissent. La légende Fawcett est née.

http://www.lexpress.fr/culture/livre/la-cite-perdue-de-z_888156.html

Brad Pitt quitte le film.

http://popwatch.ew.com/2010/11/05/brad-pitt-drops-out-lost-city-of-z/

Ca complique bien le projet.

Ah merde j'avais pas vu cette info

David Grann parle de Fawcett :