Cary Fukunaga has been spending the past few months rearranging the puzzle pieces of his directorial plans. Last fall, he dropped out of helming TNT‘s “The Alienist” (but stayed on as a producer) so he could turn his attention to “The Black Count,” but it looks like that project has stalled out. It was only a couple of weeks ago that he swung by Broadway to capture Jake Gyllenhaal singing in “Sunday In The Park With George,” and in August he’ll start filming Netflix‘s “Maniac“ starring Emma Stone and Jonah Hill. And while he gets pre-production going, it looks like the filmmaker is also eyeballing new movie projects.
Deadline reports that Fukunaga is in negotiations with Universal to helm an adaptation of Stephen Walker‘s non-fiction book “Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima.” Hossein Amini (“Drive,” “Our Kind Of Traitor,” “The Alienist”) will pen the script that will detail the events leading up to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. Here’s the book synopsis:
A riveting, minute-by-minute account of the momentous event that changed our world forever.
On a quiet Monday morning in August 1945, a five-ton bomb—dubbed Little Boy by its creators—was dropped from an American plane onto the Japanese city of Hiroshima. On that day, a firestorm of previously unimagined power was unleashed on a vibrant metropolis of 300,000 people, leaving one third of its population dead, its buildings and landmarks incinerated. It was the terrifying dawn of the Atomic Age, spawning decades of paranoia, mistrust, and a widespread and very real fear of the potential annihilation of the human race.
Author Stephen Walker brilliantly re-creates the three terrible weeks leading up to the wartime detonation of the atomic bomb—from the first successful test in the New Mexico desert to the cataclysm and its aftermath—presenting the story through the eyes of pilots, scientists, civilian victims, and world leaders who stood at the center of earth-shattering drama. It is a startling, moving, frightening, and remarkable portrait of an extraordinary event—a shockwave whose repercussions can be felt to this very day.
An intriguing project with strong potential, no doubt, but given Fukunaga’s dance card we’ll see if or when he ever gets to this.