His obsession was fueled in part by a hole that he felt that he had to fill. Fawcett was a child of an alcoholic in a very classic, pop psychology way. He was a drunk and a gambler who destroyed the family and the family fortune. What struck me was this small paragraph about Fawcett’s father. Maybe it was an act of madness on their part.īut what struck me about the book was not so much the different settings. So I had no idea why the people at Plan B decided to send me this book, because nothing in my prior work had shown that I could do anything like this. It takes place outside of New York, and it’s a period piece in the United Kingdom and the jungle. I didn’t know what it was and I hadn’t heard of the story at all. When I was sent the book in the fall of 2008, it hadn’t yet been published. It came to me from a small paragraph in the book itself. It wasn’t consciously a thought of, “Oh, I have to get out of New York now, I’ve had too much of that great city.” It was more that I wanted to pursue a character and the birth of an obsession. Can you talk about what drew you to this story? Credit: Aidan Monaghan / Amazon Studios & Bleecker Street To point out the obvious, this screenplay finally took your films out of New York City. James Gray (left) and Charlie Hunnam (second from left) on location for The Lost City of Z, an Amazon Studios and Bleecker Street release. While Gray’s latest film is a major departure for him in terms of material – it is not only an adaptation, but a film set in the United Kingdom and the Amazon jungle rather than the streets of New York – it features the same attention to character, period detail, and themes of humanity as in his other films.Ĭreative Screenwriting spoke to Gray about what aspects of the characters he connected with while adapting The Lost City of Z, the dynamics of the Fawcett family, and the challenges of writing period pieces and his next film, the science fiction movie Ad Astra. Prior to The Lost City of Z, Gray’s filmography was entirely set in New York City – from the gritty street-level, character-driven dramas of Little Odessa (1994), The Yards (2000), and We Own the Night (2007), to the period tragedy of The Immigrant (2013). But intrigue regarding the circumstances surrounding Fawcett’s devotion to his seemingly lost cause resulted in the movie rights to the book being purchased by Plan B Entertainment before the book was even published.įilmmaker James Gray wrote and directed the film, which is now being released after a long development process. The exact fate of the real-life Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett – a British explorer who devoted his life to finding the ruins of an advanced civilization he believed existed in the jungles of Brazil – remains a mystery to this day, after he disappeared on what ended up being his final expedition in 1925.įawcett’s story was told in David Grann’s 2009 book The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon. With strong support from his wife Nina (Sienna Miller), tepid support from the Royal Geographical Society, and outright distain from his son Jack, Fawcett’s growing obsession with finding this lost city in the dangerous foreign jungle becomes his life’s mission. While leading an expedition to the Amazon for military purposes, Fawcett discovers evidence that suggests that the native civilizations were far more advanced than European explorers believe. In The Lost City of Z, Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) is a British soldier hoping to prove his worth.
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