Steven Spielberg is to direct ‘The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara’ as his next project.
According to Deadline.com, the 69-year-old filmmaker is to bring an adaptation of David Kertzer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book to life on the big screen for Amblin Entertainment.
The 1997 tome tells the story of a kidnapping of a young Jewish boy in Bologna, Italy, in 1858 who has been secretly baptised and taken from his family to be raised as a Catholic. But his parents refuse to give up their son and battle to get him back pitting the Papacy against the democratic process and Italian unification as they fight for their child. .
For the project, Spielberg will be reunited with Mark Rylance who will play Pope Pius IX.
The British actor starred in the director’s latest film ‘Bridge of Spies’, winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance as Soviet intelligence office Rudolf Abel, and will be seen as the BFG in Spielberg’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s book ‘The BFG’.
The ‘Bridge of Spies’ producing team of Spielberg, Marc Platt and Kristie Macosko Krieger are to work together again on ‘The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara’ and production is scheduled to begin in early 2017 with a release date pencilled in for the end of that year.
Spielberg is certainly keeping busy as he is currently working on science-fiction film ‘Ready Player One’, which is based on Ernest Cline’s best-selling book.
Steven Spielberg to direct The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara
