Stephen Frears' Billy Wilder And Me aiming for 2024 shoot

Stephen Frears’ Billy Wilder And Me is looking at a 2024 shoot due to other commitments from cast and crew, according to writer Christopher Hampton.

Speaking to Screen in Doha, Qatar, where he is a master at the Qumra incubator, Hampton said, “We’re in a good space because Stephen Frears is going to direct it, and Christoph Waltz is going to be playing Billy Wilder.”

He said didn’t believe that a shoot this year would be possible, with next year looking most likely. 

First announced by sister site Screen in May last year, Billy Wilder And Me is an adaptation of Jonathan Coe’s 2020 novel Mr. Wilder And Me, about the struggles of the legendary US director to make his penultimate film Fedora.

The film is being co-produced with Germany’s Pandora Film, and received €75,000 in development funding from regional film fund FFF Bayern last year.

It was “one of those scripts that almost wrote itself, which is always a good sign,” Hampton said. He knew Wilder personally, after the director gave him encouragement for the writing of a Hampton’s play Tales From Hollywood, about German emigres in the Los Angeles film industry. Born Samuel Wilder in Poland in 1906, Wilder lived in Germany but left on March 5, 1933 - the day that the Nazis acquired power through federal elections.

Hampton gave updates on several other projects to which he is attached. Alongside director James Kent, he is “still trying to put together” Heart Of A Soldier, about a British and an American soldier who journey through conflict and peace from the Vietnam war to 9/11.

Having grown up in both Egypt and Yemen, Hampton is still planning to direct the long-gestating semi-autobiographical White Chameleon, with Mohamed Hefzy producing through his Cairo-based Film Clinic. The film was set to shoot as a UK production as far back as 2010, but was put on hold due to the Arab Spring uprisings.

The filmmaker also has a completed script for Dalila, about asylum seekers in the UK, which he describes as “a Ken Loach-y kind of film, very angry.”

One project he could not provide an update on is the film version of the Sunset Boulevard musical – itself based on Wilder’s 1950 classic film. “Search me!” said Hampton of the latest on the Paramount Pictures title. “I wrote the script and never heard from them again.”

Glenn Close is attached to the role of Norma Desmond, reprising the role she originated on stage in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical. Last year Close said the film version is “getting closer”.

This article originally appeared on our sister site, Screendaily.