The speed at which Steven Spielberg‘s currently operating is almost exhausting to even think about. In the less-than-nine-month gap between Bridge of Spies and The BFG alone, he’s set himself to premiere Ready Player One and Indiana Jones V in the summers of 2018 and 2019, respectively — which would seem like enough, so I’ll consider myself especially excited for whatever it is in The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara that has him going into production at the start of next year.
Then again, the pairing of lead and scribe is as good as he could hope for. Deadline have learned that Spielberg will, in early 2017, roll cameras on Edgardo Mortara, a Tony Kushner-scripted drama in which Mark Rylance — Bridge of Spies‘ scene-stealing Oscar winner and that eponymous Big Friendly Giant in the director’s next feature — will play Pope Pius IX. Based on David Kertzer‘s 1997 tome, it’s described in this Amazon listing as such:
Bologna: nightfall, June 1858. A knock sounds at the door of the Jewish merchant Momolo Mortara. Two officers of the Inquisition bust inside and seize Mortara’s six-year-old son, Edgardo. As the boy is wrenched from his father’s arms, his mother collapses. The reason for his abduction: the boy had been secretly “baptized” by a family servant. According to papal law, the child is therefore a Catholic who can be taken from his family and delivered to a special monastery where his conversion will be completed.
With this terrifying scene, prize-winning historian David I. Kertzer begins the true story of how one boy’s kidnapping became a pivotal event in the collapse of the Vatican as a secular power. The book evokes the anguish of a modest merchant’s family, the rhythms of daily life in a Jewish ghetto, and also explores, through the revolutionary campaigns of Mazzini and Garibaldi and such personages as Napoleon III, the emergence of Italy as a modern national state.
That sounds very much in the wheelhouse “prestige” Spielberg, then, and — based on the recent evidence of a) how he and Kushner exposed the many layers and troubles of political process in Lincoln, and b) how he and Rylance explored the moral complexity of taking sides in Bridge of Spies — that’s of no worry to yours truly.
Amblin is backing The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, which is expected to arrive in late 2017.