April Fools! Hold on, it’s mid-February, which presumably makes this news story, one of the more unexpected ones of the year, genuine, and it’s fairly enticing.
Andy Serkis is in Berlin, plugging his Ian Dury biopic “Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll,” and revealed to Screen Daily that he’s planning a motion-capture film version of “The Threepenny Opera,” the classic musical/operetta by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Serkis said “It’s nice to announce it in its hometown.” What’s more, Nick Cave is also involved in some aspect — presumably writing the screenplay, although it’s possible that he may have a large role in the music as well.
The piece, a version of John Gay’s 18th century “The Beggar’s Opera,” follows the sociopathic criminal Macheath, who marries the daughter of Mr. Peachum, who controls all the beggars in London. When Peachum takes against the match, he conspires to have Macheath hanged. It’s had several Broadway runs, but never a successful film adaptation, although there was an allegedly dreadful Golan-Globus version in 1989, which starred Raul Julia, Richard Harris, Roger Daltrey and Bill Nighy. This last film was known as “Mack the Knife,” and it’s for that song, which refers to title character Macheath, that it’s perhaps best known — it’s been covered by the likes of Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra and even Cave himself, as seen below.
Brecht and Weill have always been a major influence on Cave, as a look at 1996’s Murder Ballads demonstrates, so he seems a pretty great choice, and we can imagine Serkis fitting into one of the characters pretty well – he’s the king of motion capture, after all, with roles as Gollum and King Kong behind him. We’re not sure about the choice of motion capture here – the story could be done perfectly well without it, and we don’t know if anyone’s likely to put up what would presumably be a huge budget for this (but we hope someone is crazy enough…). It may be that there’s a misunderstanding in Screen Daily’s story – it would make far more sense for the two to be working on a live-action film, or even a stage production, but then again, Robert Zemeckis is doing a motion-capture “Yellow Submarine,” so we guess anything’s possible.