In 1925 Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett and his son disappeared in the Brazilian jungles while searching for a lost city he called Z. In 2005, The New Yorker published a story about how archeologist Michael Heckenberger may have found Z. David Grann turned those two stories into a book, The Lost City of Z, which Brad Pitt’s company optioned.
Now the film has found its director – James Gray, a filmmaker who has made a lot of urban movies, but never about lost cities. Gray directed the pretty darn good Little Odessa in 1994, and followed that up with the not too good The Yards in 2000 and the actually terrible We Own the Night in 2007. He’s currently in a period of hyper-activity – his next film is due out next year.
“This is a terrific opportunity to do something entirely different for
me,” Gray said. “It is a story that will be told with an epic scale,
with a main character who is larger than life.”
Pitt will be playing Fawcett, who inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and who, Cinematical tells me, was one of the inspirations for Indiana Jones.