Academy Award-nominated writer/director Tony Gilroy (“Michael Clayton,” “The Bourne Legacy”) is having a moment thanks to the rapturous critical and commercial reception of his new “Star Wars” series, “Andor,” starring Diego Luna. The showrunner is riding high with the praise given to his Lucasfilm streaming series, which presents audiences a very different experience and perspective on the galaxy far far away.
It’s interesting to note, however, that Gilroy had to come off some rejections to get there. On a recent episode of The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith podcast, Gilroy gave some more details on a show he created called “Monsieur De Paris,” a rather ambitious turn-of-the-20th-Century French series focused around a family of executioners that he was co-writing with his brother and filmmaker, Dan Gilroy (“Nightcrawler”). The series was originally set up at Gaumont International Television, but they ultimately passed on the show, seemingly deeming it too expensive and ambitious.
Asked about any projects that got away, Gilroy was cagey, including alluding to a feature that he wrote before “Andor” that also fell apart, but he eventually relented to talk about “Monsieur De Paris.”
“I’ll talk about a project that Dan [Gilroy] and I wrote together; it’s really probably one of the best things we ever worked on,” he explained. “I certainly know it’s the best thing we ever collaborated on. And we were both so terrifically excited about it, and it was a real journey. We did a [series] about the last executioner of the guillotine in France.”
There is a real level of pride you can hear in Gilroy’s voice as he described the development of the series. “It’s really our finest writing in a way; it’s called ‘Monsieur De Paris,’ and we worked on that twice. I wrote two full episodes, and Danny wrote a full episode,” he said. “We wrote a massive bible, we really put our asses into it, and it’s a show about the people who ran the guillotine. That was sort of a single-family…The last public execution was in 1939, and so the show was going to run from 1917 through 1939.”
Gilroy added the “incredibly ambitious show” encountered a reoccurring problem of certain nuanced things being lost in translation, given that the writers would be first penning scripts in English and then having to be translated into French.
Gilroy explained, “We finally decided a couple of years ago it needs to be a fully French production, and we really needed to turn it over to someone like [filmmaker] Jacques Audiard. We needed a French showrunner to take it over, and we haven’t had much success with that.”
The project, at the time, would have been helmed by director Dan Gilroy before it ultimately headed into development limbo. Audiard, the French filmmaker Gilroy mentions is one of France’s premiere directors, a mainstay at Cannes who won the Palme d’Or at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival for the film “Dheepan.”
Here’s how Deadline described the project back in 2013 when its development was first announced:
“‘Monsieur De Paris’ is set in the world of Paris 1931. It tells the story of the official executioner of France, keeper of the guillotine, and caretaker of a medieval ritual transposed into a modern world. Born into a profession passed down through six generations, he has ceased attempting to run from his chosen calling but still refuses to let it define him. He is a man who lives two lives — husband and family man, and sanctioned killer of the republic.”
It’s unclear what will happen to it, but Gilroy is clearly proud of it and still hopeful someone could bring it back to life. Perhaps, a showrunner or filmmaker in France will pick up the ball and give Gilroy his happy ending. Jacques Audiard, are you listening?
You can listen to the full podcast interview below.