With the success of “Andor,” famed Oscar-nominated filmmaker Tony Gilroy is in the news cycle and riding high on the praise heaped upon the new “Star Wars” streaming series.
Of course, the “Michael Clayton” writer/director has – like many writers in Hollywood – had his share of ups and downs, and dream projects that got away or remain on a ‘to do eventually’ list. Recently appearing on an episode of The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith podcast (via The Playlist), Gilroy offered more details on such a dream project.
Titled “Monsieur De Paris,” the series was set in early 20th century France and focuses on a family of public executioners, with the timeline involving the final years of the guillotine. Gilroy was teaming with his brother and similarly acclaimed filmmaker Dan Gilroy (“Nightcrawler”) on the show which was originally set up at Gaumont International Television a decade ago.
However, the project was passed on as it was deemed too expensive and ambitious:
“It’s really probably one of the best things we [Dan & me] ever worked on. I certainly know it’s the best thing we ever collaborated on. And we were both so terrifically excited about it, and it was a real journey. We did a [series] about the last executioner of the guillotine in France.
It’s really our finest writing in a way; it’s called ‘Monsieur De Paris,’ and we worked on that twice. I wrote two full episodes, and Danny wrote a full episode. We wrote a massive bible, we really put our asses into it, and it’s a show about the people who ran the guillotine. That was sort of a single-family…The last public execution was in 1939, and so the show was going to run from 1917 through 1939.”
One of the problems the show reportedly kept encountering was that certain nuanced elements were being lost when the writers translated the scripts from English to French. That’s when he came to a decision:
“We finally decided a couple of years ago it needs to be a fully French production, and we really needed to turn it over to someone like [filmmaker] Jacques Audiard. We needed a French showrunner to take it over, and we haven’t had much success with that.”
Of course, the world of prestige series has considerably changed over the past decade or so with the streaming revolution and serious money being spent on small-screen productions these days. Could Gilroy, armed with his “Andor” goodwill, get to come back around to this? We’ll see.
