Michael Mann is set to direct a big screen adaptation of the Bernard Cornwell novel Agincourt from a script written by Stuart Hazeldine. The last movie Mann directed was Public Enemies, and it's going to be good to see him make another historical epic. He hasn't done one since Last of the Mohicans in 1992, which is one of my favorite movies of his.
The story follows "an archer who comes of age under Henry V as the king prepares to lead his outnumbered English troops against the French in the Battle Of Agincourt. The protagonist is a young man with a death sentence on his head who is saved when his skills with the bow catch the attention of the king. The archer develops into a warrior and falls in love with a young woman whose virtue he saved from a lecherous priest. He becomes the portal to the bloody battle."
I'm sure Mann will do great things with this story and turn it into a hell of an entertaining movie. He's also currently developing a cyber crime thriller for Legendary Pictures with Chris Hemsworth.
Here's the book description for Agincourt, and let us know if you're excited to see Mann direct this historical battle film.
Agincourt (Azincourt in French) is one of the most famous battles ever fought; the victory of a small, despised, sick and hungry army over an enemy that massively outnumbered it. Azincourt, the novel coming soon, tells the story of that small army; how it embarked from England confident of victory, but was beaten down and horribly weakened by the stubborn French defence of Harfleur.
By the end of that siege common-sense dictated that the army sail for home, but Henry V was stubbornly convinced that God was on his side and insisted on marching from Harfleur to Calais to prove that he could defy the great French army that was gathering to crush him. He believed he could evade that army, but the march, like the siege, went disastrously wrong and the English were trapped and so forced to fight against an enemy that outnumbered them six to one.
Azincourt is the tale of Nicholas Hook, an archer, who begins the novel by joining the garrison of Soissons, a city whose patron saints were Crispin and Crispinian.
What happened at Soissons shocked all Christendom, but in the following year, on the feast day of Crispin and Crispinian, Hook finds himself in that small army trapped at Azincourt. The novel is the story of the archers who helped win a battle that has entered legend, but in truth is a tale, as Sir John Keegan says, ‘of slaughter-yard behaviour and outright atrocity’.