Oscar winner Tom Stoppard (“Empire of the Sun,” “Brazil”) has reportedly been hired to pen the script for “True Detective” and “Sin Nombre” director Cary Joji Fukunaga’s new film “Shockwave” about the atomic bomb that America dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in August 1945.
Based on Stephen Walker’s non-fiction book, the project offers an historical account of the three weeks leading up to the nuclear strike that devastated Japan and ushered in the nuclear age. Characters range from the Manhattan Project scientists, the pilots who deployed the bomb, the Japanese victims, and the world leaders at the time.
The film has been in development at Universal for several years with Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner set to produce, while Stoppard takes over from “Drive” scribe Hossein Amini as writer.
The news was broken by The Wall Street Journal during an interview with Fukunaga over his most recent directorial effort with the James Bond film “No Time to Die”. That film is opening next April and producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson tell the outlet they are so happy with what Fukunaga has done that they hope he’ll come back.
Broccoli says: “He far exceeded anyone’s expectations. He’s made probably one of the best Bond films ever…. He’s delivered a film on an epic scale, but it also has a tremendous, tremendous intimacy…. It’s a classic Bond movie but also a Cary Fukunaga film.” Fukunaga says he’s open to the idea.
In the meantime Fukunaga is gearing up to helm another WW2 story, the first three episodes of the $200 million budgeted Apple TV+ WW2 limited epic series “Masters of the Air” which Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks will produce.
