William Monahan won an Oscar for his screenplay for The Departed, and since then he’s been moving into directing, with his first helming effort, London Boulevard, due out in the next couple of weeks. Now it seems he planning his next film and he’s going slightly more ambitious and literary with an adaptation of Jean Anouilh’s play, Becket.
The play was previously adapted in 1964, with Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole playing Thomas a Becket and King Henry II respectively. As should come as no surprise, the plot follows how the archbishop and monarch went from being friends, to Henry having Thomas murdered by some (possibly over-zealous) knights. While the 1964 film is already an Oscar-winning classic, Monahan has promised something rather different.
The writer/director is going back to the original French text to create something new, saying “It’s an adaptation, or re-invigoration, of an older play, which has already been a brilliant film. For me, it’s a chance to take on one of the greatest stories in our civilization, a double tragedy with two heroes, each of them paradoxical, each of them brilliant, each of them making mistakes that lead to their undoing. The world of the Plantagenets was very rich and we’ll open the play up into that world and go into the relationships of the Angevin court more than the 1964 film was able to do. To adapt something is to do a literary personalization of a story, so in that sense I’ll be doing a very different Becket.” (Source: Deadline)