Arcel and Heisterberg's Hollywood career is much more than Fables
- Currently living in Los Angeles, the Danish director-writer team of the Oscar-nominated A Royal Affair are preparing three US productions
The 18th romance between German doctor Johann Friedrich Struensee and Queen Caroline Mathilda, married to Denmark’s schizofrenic King Christian VII, depicted in Danish director Nikolaj Arcel’s A Royal Affair, [+see also:
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film profile] changed life-as-usual for Arcel and his partner writer, Rasmus Heisterberg.
After winning two Silver Bears at last year’s Berlinale – one for Best Original Screenplay, the other for Best Actor (Mikkel Bo Følsgaard) – and selling more than 80 territories for TrustNordisk, the Zentropa Entertainments production took 528,000 admissions domestically and was nominated for a Golden Globe and an Oscar.
Today Arcel-Heisterberg are living in Los Angeles and have so far been attached to three US productions. “We had written together for more than 10 years, always trying to challenge ourselves by each new project – now it seemed obvious to look for an international movie,” they told the Danish Film Institute’s FILM magazine.
“We also wanted a year in the sun to get inspired, and see something else than the familiar view from the windows of Zentropa. Our girlfriends wanted to go, too, so the timing was perfect. The only promise we had made to each other was not to take on a project, unless we were really dreaming of doing it.”
Most recently they have signed for an action adventure adapted from James Jean-Bill Willingham’scomic books Fables – “some of my all-time favourites”, said Arcel. David Heyman and Jeffrey Clifford of Heyday Films – the producers behind the Harry Potter franchise – are heading the project for Warner Bros.
Even before they left for the US, they had been discussing Don Winslow’s best-selling The Power of the Dog, about Mexican drug cartels – “it has elements from all our favourite films, from The Godfather, Heat, to City of God.” Now they have written the script with producer Shane Salerno for the Story Factory to realise.
Furthermore Arcel as been signed by Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks to make a new version of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca. Heisterberg will be a consultant on the script, which will be written by Steven Knight (Eastern Promises) and produced by Working Title partners Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner.
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