Director Stephen Daldry has long been attached to a Kavalier & Clay project, and now he says he wants it to be an eight-part mini-series at HBO.In an interview with Collider, Daldry talked about his desire to create a TV project for the Michael Chabon novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. The story is about "two Jewish cousins who collaborate during World War II and create the comic book. Not just "a" comic book, but the entire concept of the comic book.
Early after it's publication in 2000, Scott Rudin started on a film adaptation. Names like Natalie Portman, Tobey Maguire, and Andrew Garfield were all rumored to be attached. The film clearly went nowhere.
Daldry was also in that list of attached names as the director, and still very interested in the project he is now seeing it going a different direction. As a series he says the story will be "so much better" than if it were a film.
The dense story spans many different settings and can be complex if you really want to analyze it, I'm an English major I have to analyze everything I read. Telling the story in a film would leave out a lot and likely make some fans angry, just like every novel adaptation.
While Daldry and Chabon are close and have worked together, it is Paramount that has the rights to the title.
If you haven't checked out the book in the 10 years that it's been out, you should do that right now, it's really quite good. NYT writer says Chabon writes "like a magical spider, effortlessly spinning out elaborate webs of words that ensnare the reader."
