Christopher Nolan Could Remake the Most Christopher Nolan-y TV Show Ever Made
The director’s love for British espionage could inform his next project.
The shadow of Oppenheimer might loom large over Hollywood, but Christopher Nolan is already working on its follow-up. The veteran writer-director won his first (and second) Oscar at the 96th Academy Awards, proving Nolan is one of the most intriguing filmmakers working today, especially when he turns his eye to science fiction.
Now, speculation is swirling about Nolan’s next project. Per Variety, Nolan is developing a remake of a classic 1960s series, The Prisoner. The British drama follows a retired intelligence agent who wakes up in a mysterious, escape-proof settlement called “The Village.” Each episode focused on a new attempt to escape, while our hero — known only as “Number Six” — tried to uncover the identity and motivation of his captors.
Nolan was attached to a film adaptation in 2009, but abandoned the project shortly before a very different reboot premiered on AMC. Fifteen years later, Nolan could be circling the material once more. It would be a fitting project for the filmmaker, whose outspoken love of British spy capers has influenced much of his work. Nolan also has an affinity for trippy, surreal sci-fi, so an adaptation of The Prisoner would slot into his oeuvre.
The Prisoner wrote the book on cerebral sci-fi, so it makes sense that Nolan would be keen to adapt it.
That said, Nolan could be working on an entirely different project, either an original screenplay or one of his shelved projects. In the early days of his career, Nolan came close to developing a biopic about aviator and filmmaker Howard Hughes. Jim Carrey was reportedly attached to star in the film, and Nolan claimed his script was one of the best he’d ever written. That project was also overshadowed by a rival picture, Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator.
“Will I revisit it? I have no idea,” Nolan told The Daily Beast in 2014. At the time, he was all-in on Interstellar, but he was still thinking about what could have been. “I usually dig out my old scripts in between movies and see if anything sparks there, and sometimes you get a chance to finish it, like Inception, and sometimes you don’t.”
As Nolan’s just coming off a big biopic, it’s unlikely he’d jump into another so soon. And while Scorsese’s movie is 20 years old, it also won five Oscars, so it hasn’t exactly faded away like AMC’s Prisoner reboot. The Prisoner seems like the better fit, but whatever Nolan chooses as his next project — be it another adaptation or an original sci-fi adventure — all eyes are on him.
