Ever since director Cary Fukunaga hit it big on the critical front with his 2009 drama Sin Nombre, I’ve been waiting for his career to blow up. Sadly, the only feature he’s put out since then is 2011’s Jane Eyre, and while it was a solid adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s novel, it’s also the umpteenth time that story has been told on screen. He is now being attached to a different adaptation, but this time for a book that hasn’t even been published yet. Deadline reports DreamWorks has acquired Noble Assassin, a book proposal by Paul Kix, and they’re interested in putting Fukunaga at the helm.
Noble Assassin will dive into the insane war-time life of the Paris-born Robert de La Rochefoucauld, whose bravery knew no bounds. A member of Charles de Gaulle’s army, de La Rochefoucauld was brought into the British Special Ops, where he was trained in explosives, close combat and other forms of all-around badassery. Back in France, he helped the French Resistance hold off German forces, at one point barely escaping his own execution. It’s a story that would work wonderfully as a feature, though it’s unclear whether the book will be a historical biography or a fictionalized version.
As this is a slightly more limited story than the usual war film, it seems like Fukunaga would be able to turn this material into something visually amazing. But he’s only attached at this point and hasn’t signed anything official. And given the book will probably take some time to get a release, we might not be seeing this project come together for quite a while.
That fits right into the other projects that Fukunaga has been attached to in the past year or so. Most notably, he was tapped to direct and co-write a new two-feature adaptation of Stephen King’s monstrous monster epic It for Warner Bros. He’s currently in pre-production stages for the adaptation of Uzodinma Iweala’s novel Beasts of No Nation, which just added Idris Elba to its cast yesterday, making this film more likely to get completed before anything else.
Fukunaga also directed the upcoming HBO crime drama series True Detective, starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, which will follow the years-long investigation of a serial killer in Louisiana. The series doesn’t have a release date yet, but it will reportedly follow Treme whenever it returns for its fourth season in December.
Most recently, Fukunaga released the excellent short film Sleepwalking in the Rift, which you can watch below.
