Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name) is hoping to resurrect his dream project, a 10-episode television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.
The filmmaker collected an all-star ensemble two years ago, including Cate Blanchett, Ralph Fiennes, Andrew Garfield, and Rooney Mara, to lead a 10-part premium TV adaptation of Waugh’s great portrait of British upper-class decadence.
However, the HBO and BBC project was canceled due to financial constraints. “It’s a really tragic narrative,” Guadagnino told Deadline late Sunday night, following a screening of his latest film Bones and All at the Telluride Film Festival, a frightening love story about cannibals hunting, hopelessly, for their next meal starring Timothee Chalamet, Taylor Russell, and Mark Rylance.
Guadagnino stated that he and Benjamin Walters, a young British writer, worked on the screenplays for Brideshead Revisited for 18 months. “I had a fantastic cast, but I needed money, and the money I needed was $110 million, $11 million each episode, and there was no way we could pull it off.”
“I thought to myself, ‘I cannot compromise,'” he said. It needs to be done exactly how I want it done.’
Guadagnino had cast Garfield (click, tick…BOOM!) as tormented artist Charles Ryder with the aim of sharing the role. “I wanted Garfield to play an older Charles Ryder,” he explained.
He went on to say that a younger actor will play Ryder at Oxford alongside Sebastian Flyte, the teddy-bear-obsessed son of a wealthy Catholic.
