Ever since her breakout film “Persepolis,” director Marjane Satrapi has stayed dedicated to following her own unique filmmaking, even if the results haven’t always found big, commercial success. “Chicken With Plums” and “The Gang Of The Jotas” were firmly arthouse efforts, and while “The Voices” starring Ryan Reynolds tipped toward a more mainstream audiences, the freaky premise and dark comedy kept the picture within the niche, genre fold. However, Satrapi could capture a bigger crowd with her next effort.
The director has signed up to helm “Radioactive,” which will feature Rosamund Pike in the lead role as the world famous scientist, Marie Curie. Based on the book “Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout” by Lauren Redniss, and adapted by Jack Thorne (“The Scouting Book For Boys,” “The Last Panthers”) the film will be less a biopic, and instead focus on the romance between Marie and Pierre Curie. Here’s the book synopsis:
In 1891, 24-year-old Marie Sklodowska moved from Warsaw to Paris, where she found work in the laboratory of Pierre Curie, a scientist engaged in research on heat and magnetism. They fell in love. They took their honeymoon on bicycles. They expanded the periodic table, discovering two new elements with startling properties, radium and polonium. They recognized radioactivity as an atomic property, heralding the dawn of a new scientific era. They won the Nobel Prize. Newspapers mythologized the couple’s romance, beginning articles on the Curies with “Once upon a time . . . ” Then, in 1906, Pierre was killed in a freak accident. Marie continued their work alone. She won a second Nobel Prize in 1911, and fell in love again, this time with the married physicist Paul Langevin. Scandal ensued. Duels were fought.
In the century since the Curies began their work, we’ve struggled with nuclear weapons proliferation, debated the role of radiation in medical treatment, and pondered nuclear energy as a solution to climate change. In Radioactive, Lauren Redniss links these contentious questions to a love story in 19th Century Paris.
Radioactive draws on Redniss’s original reporting in Asia, Europe and the United States, her interviews with scientists, engineers, weapons specialists, atomic bomb survivors, and Marie and Pierre Curie’s own granddaughter.
Whether young or old, scientific novice or expert, no one will fail to be moved by Lauren Redniss’s eerie and wondrous evocation of one of history’s most intriguing figures.
StudioCanal is backing the picture, and it looks like a great marriage between director, star, and source material. No word yet, however, on when cameras will roll. [Variety]