'Hanna' TV Show In The Works From 'The Night Manager' Writer/Producer
David Farr likely isn't returning to write the second season of The Night Manager. He's said before that John le Carré's spy story is over for him, but one story he might return to is one he co-wrote years ago. The wrier-director is hoping to make a Hanna television series with NBCUniversal International Studios.
Below, learn more about the Hanna TV show.
According to Deadline, Farr is working on bringing director Joe Wright's espionage fairy tale to the small screen. The outlet has few specifics on the series, such as how closely it'll follow the 2011's film's storyline. In that film, Hanna (Saoirse Ronan), a trained killer, is exploring the world for the first time and searching for her father, Erik Heller (Eric Bana), as she's hunted by Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett) and her fellow "wolves."
Seth Lochhead wrote the original script when he was in college. His script then went through various revisions without his involvement. After both Danny Boyle (Trainspotting) and Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity) exited Hanna, Wright read the script and was intrigued the project, but not so interested in cutting to Langley for some expository walk and talks and boardroom meetings. He looked at Lochhead's earlier draft, was wowed by it, and brought him back to do some rewrites and magnify the fairy tale elements of the story.
In an interview with CineVu, Farr mentioned his vision for Hanna was "very different" than Wright's:
Film is a director's medium so it can be frustrating that, increasingly, the screenplay is there to act as bait for great talent; it is really the beginning of the creative journey. Then the director arrives, bringing the actors. Hanna was very different to how I imagined it when I wrote the draft but in an enormously exciting way. Joe Wright was fascinated in the fairytale and he pushed that to quite an extreme level, stylized the film in a hugely successful way.
Maybe Farr's series will more closely resemble what he had in mind for Hanna than the finished film, but that's purely speculation. There's certainly potential in a Hanna television series. Some major events, especially in Erik and Marissa's lives, occur off-screen in Wright's film. The movie doesn't need to provide any more information than it does about their past, but a part of the fun of the film is that it lets your imagination run wild, filling in those blanks and letting you imagine the events being discussed. It's an action movie with a unique tone and style. Hopefully, if we ever see it, Farr can bring a different personality to the Hanna television show and deliver the unexpected.