The Return of the native, le roman de Thomas Hardy adapté par Kenneth Branagh ??

Bien que cette info ait rapidement été relayée par les médias, elle est à prendre avec des énormes pincettes.
Kenneth Branagh était invité au Panel de la chaîne PBS il y a quelques jours et y a déclaré vouloir travailler sur une adaptation du roman de Thomas Hardy, The Return of the native (Le Retour au Pays Natal). Il s'agit là d'un projet qui lui tient à cœur depuis des années, ce roman étant un de ses préférés.

Citation :

Masterpiece exec producer Rebecca Eaton, still upstairs at the TCA hotel in Pasadena with the flu, again missed panels today for her franchise’s panels at the confab, including one in which Kenneth Branagh came to discuss Wallander, The Final Season, airing May 8-22. This was particularly disappointing for Eaton, given that Branagh had starred in the very first program she acquired in her three-decade tenure at Masterpiece, Fortunes Of War, which also had been her first presentation at a TCA.
“During my 30 years at Masterpiece, the series has had no better friend than Sir Ken,” Eaton said in a statement read by her proxy, Masterpiece senior series producer Susanne Simpson  “The boy can act – we all know that – but he’s gone the distance, time and again, to do everything it takes to publicize and draw attention to our work.”

Branagh, Eaton said, is “a man who understands, right down to his shoes, that good drama, whether it’s theater, television or movies, elevates all of us.”

Along those lines, Branagh this morning got asked if there was any project he wished he’d tackled for TV.

According to Branagh, after making his film adaptation of Henry V, the play was doing a run in the theater in the Mark Taper Forum (along with King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in repertoire) and some Hollywood execs invited him to meet, and see if he had “anything else.” At the time he was trying to mount an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s novel “The Return of the Native” – “a novel I love,” he told TV critics.

The response? “It was doing no business at all” he said, despite the fact, “I was in theory, I had some ‘heat’, I believe it’s referred to, at that time,” he joked. “Nobody was biting And I danced – I danced all the dances of a dancing man: ‘It’s a cross between Wuthering Heights and Gone with the Wind and whatever was on last weekend that made a lot of money – it’s like that as well!’,” he reminisced of his pitch.

“So that one, yeah, I’d love to do that one.

Note to Eaton: your proxy’s response: “OK, we’ll take it.”

Reste à voir si ce projet tombera dans les oubliettes, comme son adaptation de The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society ...

Oui je n'y crois pas trop surtout qu'il joue au théâtre jusqu'en novembre et qu'il a l'adaptation du crime de l'Orient Express aussi.

S'il trouve un financement, ce ne sera pas pour tout de suite, c'est certain. Qui vivra verra comme on dit ...

En tous cas, à première vue, ça m'aurait plus botté que Cendrillon et Le crime de l'Orient Express ...

Ahlàlà, ce serait une super nouvelle !! C'est un de mes Hardy préféré ! Et il me semble que celui-ci n'a jamais eu droit à une adaptation cinématographique (juste télévisuelle). Croisons les doigts !!