"There has never been a feature film about the Peterloo Massacre," Mike Leigh said in a press release. "Apart from the universal political significance of this historic event, the story has a particular personal resonance for me, as a native of Manchester and Salford." Well, now he’s going to make it happen.
The director announced that the Peterloo Massacre will be the subject of his next film. It will tell the story of the infamous 1819 massacre by government forces at a peaceful pro-democracy rally at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester, where 700 working people were injured, and 18 killed. The filmmaker will reunite with his longtime collaborator, cinematographer Dick Pope, to shoot the project, but here’s the thing — it won’t lens until 2017. Why the delay?
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Well, Leigh is currently gearing up "The Pirates Of Penzance" for the English National Opera, and we’d reckon that the scale of Leigh’s Peterloo project will be quite large and require some amount of prep work before it can roll. But this is something to look forward to, even if we won’t see it for some time yet.