James Gray's 'The Lost City of Z' - starring B. Cumberbatch, R. Patterson

[CHEЯNOБLY!]

Ok, I am super excited for this...James Gray, who's recent film The Immigrant (2013) was received very positively, is writing and directing an adaptation of The Lost City of Z, with Benedict Cumberbatch starring as British archaeologist Percy Fawcett (based on a true story). I have watched several documentaries on Fawcett, and I am glad it is in the hands of Gray, as I thought he did a wonderful job with The Immigrant.

For anyone not familiar, Fawcett was an early 20th century explorer who set out to find the remanence of an ancient Amazonian kingdom that had been rumored to exist amongst Westerners since the days of the early Spanish and Portuguese conquests of the Americas. It looks like Robert Patterson will probably play Fawcett's son, who went with him on the expedition.

From Empire:

While the recent rumours linking Benedict Cumberbatch to Star Wars Episode VII were shot down quicker than an X-Wing diving into a Death Star trench, we do now know he’s pencilling in one more job into the diary, entering negotiations to star in James Gray’s The Lost City Of Z.

This is one of those projects that has been hacking through the development undergrowth for ages now, with Brad Pitt and his Plan B production company spearheading the adaptation of David Grann’s bestseller. Pitt had long planned to star, but is now apparently happy for someone else to go exploring.

Assuming he makes a deal (and “negotiations” rather than “talks” signifies that could be imminent), Cumberbatch will play Percy Fawcett, who headed into Brazil’s Amazon jungles on a mapping quest in 1925. There, suffering from a nasty case of malaria, he claimed to have discovered a mythical city he called the Lost City Of Z.

When his adventurer peers roundly mocked the idea as a fantasy or fraud, Fawcett gathered up his son and one other companion and headed back into the jungle to prove his point. And that’s the last anyone saw of all three…

Gray wrote the most recent version of the script and will call the shots. Cumberbatch will be this year’s festival and awards-season MVP with 12 Years A Slave, August: Osage County and The Fifth Estate all screening, and he’s back on genre duty for The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug on December 13.

From MovieFone.com

"Lost City of Z" is one of those fascinating, belabored projects that finally seems to be getting off the ground. Initially, Brad Pitt was set to star, but that fell through sometime in 2010. Pitt remained on board as a producer, but writer/director James Gray was forced to seek out a new leading man, who he recently found in Benedict Cumberbatch. The project has just added another explorer to its expedition in the form of Robert Pattinson, who will play an unspecified role. This keeps getting better and better!

The film is based on New Yorker science writer David Grann's book of the same name (which is, by the way, amazing). Cumberbatch plays Lt. Colonel Percy Fawcett, a British archeologist and explorer who went missing in South America while hunting for the lost city of Z. In the book, Grann tries to retrace the Fawcett expedition and piece together what exactly happened to him and his team, which included Fawcett's son Jack and one of Jack's friends. The book will be set entirely during the fateful 1925 expedition (Fawcett had made numerous treks down there). Our guess is that Pattinson will play Fawcett's son.

Gray described the feel of the new movie to Screen Daily as having the epic scale of an old David Lean, but "slightly more hallucinogenic." Um, we're there! Hopefully this will get underway in 2014 for a release in 2015. In the meantime, read the damn book –- it's great.