“It’s a very big, sweeping story”
Will anyone want to see a story of Vlad the Impaler lacking fangs, crosses and other archetypes one finds in a Dracula tale?
We’ll find out when Summit Entertainment moves forward on Vlad, the Brad Pitt-produced period picture that looks at the prince’s origins. Writing the script is Sons of Anarchy star Charlie Hunnam who tells EW that the film will skirt the notion of any vampirism.
Instead, Hunnam describes the film as a “very big and sweeping story” in the vein of Braveheart. It sounds like he has done a ton of research in preparation to write the script. And if the word vampire came up?
“That was my one non-negotiable area when we were developing it, and thankfully, nobody suggested that we should delve into it at the end,” he says. “But you can clearly see the things that Bram Stoker took… Vlad was such a brutal man, and the trick is to make him sympathetic. That was the challenge, and if we’ve succeeded in any way in this script, I truly believe that it’s genuinely making him sympathetic.”
Vlad’s story has been touched on before, not just in Bram Stoker’s Dracula but in a 2003 film entitled Vlad and a made-for-television flick Dark Prince: The True Story of Dracula which starred Rudolf Martin who, coincidentally, played Dracula in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
For more with Hunnam, check out this interview.
Source: EW
