Imagine the state of Christopher Nolan’s glass recycling container this week. Positively overflowing with empty champagne bottles, left over from celebrations after Oppenheimer swept all before it at the Oscars on Sunday night.
Just like with the Super Bowl, America gets it wrong again. You go large on a Saturday night to take advantage of recovery Sunday. You don’t throw your biggest events on a Sunday. But I digress…
Nolan has a reputation for refusing to spin plates, never mobilizing one project until the previous one is properly completed. As Oppenheimer fades into a memory, what will he do next? There was talk about Bond, but that remains highly unlikely. Now Variety resurfaces a past rumor as something in the frame for his next effort.
Buried in their report on Nolan’s mammoth payday for Oppenheimer, they talk of a return to a previous project that stalled. A big screen remake of the classic 1960s British TV series The Prisoner.
The series followed Number Six (Patrick McGoohan), an unnamed British intelligence agent who, after abruptly and angrily resigning from his highly sensitive government job, prepares to go on a trip. While packing his luggage, he is rendered unconscious by knockout gas piped into his home in Westminster, London.
Upon waking, he finds himself in an exact re-creation of the interior of his home, located in a mysterious coastal settlement known to its residents as “the Village”. The Village is surrounded by mountains on three sides and the sea on the other.
Most are captives but some are guards. Prisoners, therefore, have no idea whom they can and cannot trust. While they are free to live their lives within the Village, they are under constant surveillance and all attempts to escape are doomed to fail.
AMC released a version starring Jim Caviezel, Ruth Wilson, and Sir Ian McKellen back in 2009. It was a project on Nolan’s radar back in his Batman days, but it didn’t move forward.
