Celebrated “12 Years a Slave,” “Hunger” & “Shame” director Steve McQueen has had a change of heart with his latest project.
Following his American remake of the classic BBC mini-series “Widows” last year, McQueen set about working on a BBC TV series titled “Small Axe”. That project was apparently going to be an anthology about London’s West Indian community from the 1960s-1980s.
Now though, during the announcement this morning of this year’s Cannes selections, it has been revealed McQueen has apparently retooled the project with Deadline reporting it will become five feature-length films.
Of those five, two have been handed Official Cannes Selection titles – “Mangrove” and “Lover’s Rock”. “Mangrove” is the true story of the Mangrove Nine and stars Letitia Wright, Shaun Parkes, and Malachi Kirby. “Lover’s Rock” deals with young love at a blues party in the early 1980s.
John Boyega and Jack Lowden also star in one of the five films, but it’s not clear which ones they are in. McQueen has dedicated the two Cannes selectees to both George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Such a move isn’t entirely unprecedented. David Lynch famously turned his scrapped “Mulholland Drive” TV series pilot into the celebrated film of the same name. More recently, the Coen brothers turned a planned six-episode Netflix anthology series into the feature “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”.
Even so, five films is considerable. It’s not clear how any of the films will be distributed at this point.
Source: The Playlist
