Christopher Nolan Escapes ‘The Prisoner’

With his mind and directing skills being used on other projects, the status of Christopher Nolan helming the film adaptation of The Prisoner was unclear, until now. The director had signed up for taking on the directing duties for the project in 2006 for Universal, but Warner Bros. obviously made a couple of offers to the director that he couldn’t refuse (Batman sequels and Inception).

Being a fan of the television show, and tracking the history of the translation onto film, the good news is that according to the producer Barry Mendel (via ThePlaylist by way of cinefools) they are sticking to “tradition” and are still working with the same script that would have attracted Nolan to the projec tin the first place. The new concern came by way of AMC launching the mini-series – but Mendel responded,

“I don’t know, I mean if the series was wildly popular that might effect us but the screenplay that David and Janet wrote was such a re-imagination of the series, if you think of The Avengers that wasn’t a commercially successful film but it was very much in the spirit of the original show, this is very, ah, it looks and feels so different that the tenants of the show are apparent but the execution of it is so different that I think it is unrecognizable, where as the TV show is a well done modernly shot updated version of the original show, but much more faithful to the original show.”

For those who know nothing about the cult classic – it was based on the 17-episode 1960’s British spy TV show starring Patrick McGoohan. A British secret agent, trying to quit his job, wakes up in a strange place, “The Village”, where he’s only known as No. 6, from which there is no escape, and any attempt to escape is blocked.