Variety has announced that Steven Spielberg has decided on his follow-up film (sort of) to the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and it will be his presidential biopic Lincoln with Liam Neeson in line to play the title role.
Speilberg told FOCUS magazine the news saying he was going to turn his attention to an epic project about the 16th president, for a DreamWorks film that could begin filming possibly by early next year. I say “Near” in the headline and “sort of” above as Spielberg will first put in work on his leg of Tintin with Peter Jackson.
If you are wondering why this article is even a story, it’s because Spielberg was also considering The Trial of the Chicago Seven, which had Sacha Baron Cohen, Jeff Daniels and Colin Hanks in the “want” list. That project fell through due to script rewrite issues during the writers’ strike and now appears to be in limbo. The project was a drama about the trial of anti-Vietnam war protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
So now we have Lincoln, a project that is something that interests me wildly and if all moves smoothly it could begin production in 2009. Tony Kushner (“Angels in America” and Munich) penned the script with plenty of inspiration from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “The Uniter: The Genius of Abraham Lincoln”.
On top of that it would be Spielberg’s reunion with Liam Neeson who played Oskar Schindler in Spielberg’s 1993 Oscar-winner Schindler’s List. It’s a project that smells of success, interest and entertainment (to me). Sally Field is also said to be playing Lincoln’s wife Mary Todd.
