Neil - The Best Films that Were Never Made
Every day a number of interesting films miss out on getting made for a variety of reasons, but as film director Neil Hollander states, there are some that particularly stand out from the crowd, questioning people around the world, what would have been if they were made. Simply because they are too fascinating to dismiss, some of the following projects listed by Neil Hollander are the best films that were never made.
He starts of his list with Heart of Darkness by Orson Welles. Heart of Darkness, the acclaimed novel by Joseph Conrad had its best, although quite free adaptation with Apocalypse Now, but even so millions of people including Hollander remain interested to find out what was Orson Welles previous version like. Sources reveal that he was already in serious preparations for the film, he had completed the script of more than 180 pages, which back in those years was not that common, had already selected the actors, but it turned out that this monumental imaginary spectacle was ultimately was too expensive, and Orson Welles got rejected from the head RKO.
They couldn’t agree about the next project as well, so Welles decided to go with his plan B and chose a new project, which will debut as a film director. The name of that project was Citizen Kane, which proved to be the best possible backup plan as the film became the most famous piece in his career, and one of the most famous films in general.
The Short Night by Alfred Hitchcock is the second piece that Neil Hollander's list. Like Welles, Hitchcock as well had accumulated quite a number of unrealized projects during his more than half a century long career, and the last on which he had intensively worked on, certainly sounded quite intriguing. According to Hollander, it was an adaptation of the eponymous spy novel of Ronald Kirkbride, a tense hunt of a double agent, for which Hitchcock had intended to capture a realistic version of James Bond. For the main roles Hitchcock had planned Clint Eastwood and Sean Connery, and had chosen an entire acting team including Liv Ullmann, Catherine Deneuve and Walter Matthau.
The director spent more than three years working on this project and had changed several screenwriters, until he was ultimately satisfied with the version written by David Freeman. However, during the preproduction phase, due to his fragile health the director decided to retire, and soon after died.
