Just saw the trailer myself last night... depressing. The producer used to direct commercials, and it shows..the movie has that distinct 300'ish look to it...not looking forward to that at all..
There was a project in the works for a Hollywood movie based on the real life of Vlad Dracula (no damn vampires, the historical figure was just as interesting, if not more, than any Dracula/Vampire story), but I haven't seen an update for it in some time.
FOR THE PEOPLE WHO READ THIS COMMENT THIS IS ABOUT ANOTHER MOVIE CALLED ''VLAD'' WICH IS STILL IN PRODUCTION!
They where asked if the movie ''
Vlad'' will be more 300 or Braveheart. They said Braveheart. It will tell the story of Vlad and Radu. It will begin when they are in Istanbul as little kids. Awesome idea for a movie. The screenplay is written by Sons of Anarchy star Charlie Hunnam.
This is what he said:
Was 300 the vibe you were going for in the script?
CHARLIE HUNNAM: My hope when writing it was for the end result to be more
Braveheart than
300, and I think that as it’s evolved, we’ve got a pretty good mixture of both. I labor a little bit more over the history than
300 did. I was really interested in the reality of how this man turned into the myth, and because of some of his behaviors, it’s actually very easy to weave that mythology in, in a true way. As a writer, you have your idea of what it’s going to be, and now I have to release it. It’s Mandler’s film. But I have a lot of faith in him, and I like him tremendously as a human being, so I feel in safe hands turning my baby over to him.
What can you share about the plot?
It’s a very big and sweeping story. The majority of time focuses on him as a young man assuming his rule as a prince, but we actually go all the way through his life. Basically what happened was, the Ottoman Empire was expanding at an exponentially fast rate with a father-son duo of sultans, who increased the size of their territory tenfold within 50 years. They got over the Danube into Wallachia, which is the southern part of modern-day Romania. Romania used to be three separate principalities: Wallachia, Transylvania, and Moldavia.
So the Ottoman came. They conquered Vlad’s father, also named Vlad Dracul — Vlad the Dragon. In Eastern Orthodox Catholicism, because of the iconography of George slaying the dragon, the dragon and the devil was one in the same. If you add an ‘a’, it denotes “son of,” so Dracula literally translates to “son of the devil.” So right away, from the moment he was born, before he did anything heinous of his own volition, he had a pretty bad rap because of his name. So the Ottoman said to Vlad’s father, “You can stay in power, rule your country as you wish, allow Catholicism to flourish, but you have to allow my people who will come to live here now equal rights to their faith, Islam.” There were all of these terms, but overall it was a pretty generous deal until the final moment: The Sultan wanted Vlad’s two youngest children. He intended to raise the children himself, make them devout Muslims, then put them back on the throne at a later date with the proper bloodline and yet loyalty to the Ottoman. So Vlad and his brother Radu went. Vlad was about 12, and already had a pretty elevated sense of who he was, but Radu was only seven and much, much more malleable. So they ended up, in Vlad’s mind, corrupting his brother and converting his brother to Islam. Radu was treated like a prince by the Ottomans, and Vlad was trapped like a slave, like a prisoner. About eight years after they got taken by the Ottoman, his father was murdered, and Vlad decided he was going to escape, avenge his father’s murder, take his throne back and oppose the Ottoman. So he escaped from court, went to his brother, and his brother refused to come with him. It started a 17-year war between the brothers, Christian vs. Muslim.
And we won’t be seeing any vampires in the film?
As the script stands now, we don’t touch on vampirism. 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. 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. He was doing what he thought was right. He was the one who was being invaded and whose religious beliefs were being stripped away. Vlad met the Sultan three times in battle through the course of his life and at any time he meant him, he was outnumbered 5 to 1. A lot of his brutality just came out of military necessity — shock tactics and fear tactics to give him the upper hand, because he just couldn’t meet them man-to-man. Gunpowder had also just been discovered, so Vlad was fighting with bows and arrows and swords and the Ottoman Empire had guns. He had the advantage of fighting on home ground and he knew the terrain better, which gave him the ability to fight at night. Because he would fight at night, he would try to get his men on a night schedule, so they hadn’t already been up for 12 hours through the day. There are a million ways to show that this guy is the origin of vampirism without actually having him drinking blood.
I cant give you the source link, because i have 4 posts. But i you google 'Sons of Anarchy' star Charlie Hunnam talks about his screenplay for 'Vlad' You will find the article.
