Chernobyl director Johan Renck and manufacturing associate Michael Parets will adapt Andrew O’Hagan’s new epic British novel Caledonian Highway for TV.
Just lately revealed by Faber to rave opinions, Caledonian Highway is a Dickensian story of the rise and fall of Campbell Flynn, an artwork historian and movie star mental, informed in opposition to the backdrop of modern-day Britain and the deep-set corruption on the coronary heart of the ruling class. O’Hagan is a three-time Booker Prize nominee (for Our Fathers, Be Close to Me and The Illuminations). His final novel, Mayflies, was tailored as a drama collection by BBC in 2022 starring Martin Compston, Tony Curran and Ashley Jensen.
Parets and Renck will produce Caledonian Highway by way of their Fremantle-backed manufacturing firm Sinestra, with Renck set to direct. Emmy-winning showrunner Will Smith (Veep, The Consider It, Sluggish Horses) will adapt the e book for the display screen. O’Hagan will function government producer.
“We’ve lengthy appeared to Andrew O’Hagan’s relentless dissection of recent instances to assist make sense of our more and more discombobulating world,” mentioned Renck and Parets. “So it’s with actual pleasure we will now name him a collaborator, as we go forth with Andrew, Will Smith and our companions at Fremantle for an adaptation rooted within the seismic power of the masterful Caledonian Highway.”
O’Hagan mentioned there was “fast and arresting” curiosity in a TV adaptation of his novel, however that he “solely had eyes for Sinestra,” which he known as “one of many boldest and most imaginative manufacturing corporations on this planet proper now…. Including the fantastic abilities of adapter and show-runner Will Smith to this group was a stroke of genius: he’s merely one of the best within the enterprise.”
An Emmy-winner for his route on HBO’s Chernobyl, Renck first collaborated with producer Parets on the Netflix sci-fi movie Spaceman starring Adam Sandler, Carey Mulligan and Paul Dano, which premiered on the Berlin Movie Pageant earlier this 12 months. Renck and Parets launched Sinestra in 2022 and signed a first-look cope with Fremantle that provides the worldwide indie manufacturing powerhouse first crack at co-financing and co-producting the corporate’s TV initiatives in addition to dealing with worldwide gross sales.
Caledonian Highway is the newest within the rising Sinestra-Fremantle TV slate, which incorporates small-screen variations of Antoine Wilson’s Nineteen Nineties-set novel Mouth to Mouth and Mona Awad’s best-seller Rouge, in addition to the characteristic movie Amo Saddam, tailored from Will Bardenwerper’s The Prisoner in His Palace, which stars Saltburn actor Barry Keoghan as a U.S. soldier tasked with guarding Saddam Hussein within the months earlier than his execution.
O’Hagan is represented by Peter Straus at RCW Literary Company and Casarotto Ramsay & Associates. Lucinda Prain dealt with the deal for Casarotto alongside Raffaella De Angelis who spearheaded the literary acquisition for Fremantle, overseen by Fremantle World Drama CEO Christian Vesper and World Drama COO Seb Shorr.