Fernando Mereilles To Direct Peter Morgan’s ‘360’

Catching an early festival screening of “City of God” remains one of our most indelible moviegoing experiences; we walked in knowing nearly nothing, other than some positive buzz from Cannes, and we walked out convinced we’d seen a classic. And the film’s held up over time; we even named it our favorite movie of 2003 in our best-of-the-decade pieces last year. So we’ve always expected great things from its director, Fernando Meirelles.

Unfortunately, he’s never quite delivered; “The Constant Gardener” was very strong, but a little too earnest and bland, and the less about 2008’s “Blindness” the better. It’s taken the helmer a little while to set up his next film; there were rumors he might direct the next Jack Ryan movie, and he’s likely to direct a segment of “Rio, I Love You,” but there’s been no news on anything more substantial.

Until today; Deadline have reported that the helmer has signed on to direct a new script by Peter Morgan (“The Queen,” “Frost/Nixon”) entitled “360,” a project we first reported on during Cannes this year. The drama, set up at BBC Films and Austria’s ORF Fernsehfilm, is a retelling of the classic Arthur Schnitzler play “Reigen.”

The play, perhaps the best known work by Schnitzler, who also wrote the short story that served as the basis for Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut,” has been adapted a number of times, from Max Ophuls’ 1950 film “La Ronde” to David Hare’s 1998 play “The Blue Room,” which starred Nicole Kidman and Iain Glen. It has a simple, and rather brilliant conceit; it’s made up of several short scenes between couples, who are shown before or after a sexual liaison. After each scene, one character from the pairing is then shown with another partner, who is then shown with another partner, and so on, until the promiscuity comes full circle.

The play has been brought up to date by Morgan, but it’s expected to keep a similar structure. While it can be a risky endeavor (Hare’s version is one of the lesser works of his career), there’s an enormous amount of potential in the conceit, and the pairing of Morgan and Meirelles should be enough to excite any cinephile. There’s no word of a start date yet, but we hope it’ll be sooner rather than later.