While Brad Pitt may be working on a biopic of John Lennon’s life, Oscar-winning actress Angelina Jolie is set to play Cleopatra in an upcoming biopic based on Cleopatra: A Life, the biography by Pulitzer Prize-winning American nonfiction author Stacy Schiff.
"I hope to one day [play her], but we don't have it all together," Jolie told MTV last month about the film. "All the pieces are not together."
Paul Greengrass, known for his international success with the Bourne action series and United 93, may be taking on the directing duties for the Cleopatra 3-D adaptation.
Deadline reported that producer Scott Rudin — who has already bought up the film rights — said, “We’re pretty close” to signing a director for the project and that sources told the Web site that filmmakers “like the idea” of Greengrass for the film. Jolie, 35, has not yet commented on the possibility.
Guardian UK reports that the writer tells of how the 18-year-old queen "controlled virtually the entire eastern Mediterranean coast, the last great kingdom of any Egyptian ruler. For a fleeting moment she held the fate of the western world in her hands." The author steers away from portraying her as a “whore queen,” and rather much like “the sole female of the ancient world to rule alone and to play a role in western affairs.”
MTV reports that Rudin describes the script as "a completely revisionist Cleopatra, a much more grown-up, sophisticated version,” much like Schiff’s biography of the Queen’s life.
"She's not a sex kitten, she's a politician, strategist, warrior," he went on to explain. "In the Joseph Mankiewicz movie, Elizabeth Taylor is a seductress, but the histories of Cleopatra have been written by men. This is the first to be written by a woman. It felt like such a blow-the-doors-off-the-hinges idea of how to tell it, impossible to resist."
Sony plans to start the production of the film sometime in 2011.
(source:http://thecelebritycafe.com)
