“Dune” filmmaker Denis Villeneuve has a lot of options for what he could make next, and one of them could be his long-gestating “Cleopatra” movie based on the Stacy Schiff novel “Cleopatra: A Life” for Sony Pictures (he has a couple of options, one of them being a third “Dune” movie too).
Before that, however, some may remember the era when filmmaker David Fincher had a version of the movie set up at Paramount, circa 2012, that would have starred Oscar-winning actress Angelina Jolie (long before the competing Gal Gadot incarnation with Patty Jenkins and Kari Skogland).
In a new interview with Inverse, screenwriter Brian Helgeland (“Man On Fire”) detailed what the vision for “Cleopatra” would have been as he spent many months writing it for Fincher.
“It had elements of a political thriller with assassinations and sex, but it’s an epic that’s divided between her love affairs with Caesar and Marc Antony,” Helgeland said about his original script intended for Angelina Jolie.
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However, don’t look at those revelations as blueprints for Villeneuve’s version; Helgeland doesn’t think they’ll use it.
“I don’t have anything to do with the current version unless they call me and want to use my draft, he explained. “Lots of true events surprised me when I was writing it. For example, the day Caesar was assassinated — the Ides of March and all that stuff — she was in Rome. They were leaving for Egypt, and the reason why they had to kill him at that time was because he was headed out of town with her. That’s historically true and featured in the script. She writes Marc Antony’s speech — ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen’ — because he doesn’t know what to say, but she tells him what to say. It’s sort of her way of saying ‘fuck you’ to those guys because she’s smart enough and he’s not. I have no idea if that script is being used, but I’ll be very happy if it is.”
Jolie wasn’t a stranger to these grand period epics before attaching herself to “Cleopatra.” The actress played Alexander The Great’s mother in Oliver Stone’s long-forgotten “Alexander,” which starred Colin Farrell as the conquering historical figure twenty years ago. “Alexander” was one of many expensive and ambitious studio projects from the early 2000s that attempted to replicate the critical and box office success of Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator” and seemingly just exhausted audiences instead.
Perhaps it’s the right time to make another big historical epic with event films being all the rage with audiences again. Obviously, to that end, the “Gladiator” sequel is arriving later this year, and it’s another project that took over 20 years to materialize. Villeneuve incarnation of “Cleopatra” could have better luck getting made before he moves on to “Dune: Messiah.” The director already has had two acclaimed screenwriters working on it, David Scarpa (“Napoleon,” “Gladiator 2”) and Academy Award-winner Eric Roth (“Dune,” “Killers of The Flower Moon”), since Helgeland moved on to other things. In the past, Villeneuve suggested that his “Dune” star Zendaya would be his Cleopatra star, but it probably all depends on the stars aligning and when he sets his mind to make the picture.