The Oscar-winning Irish writer and director, Neil Jordan, is writing a screenplay dealing with the powerful and nefarious Borgia family of Renaissance Italy. The film, titled Lucrezia, deals with the family which dominated Italy in the 1400s and 1500s and produced two popes.
The title character, Lucrezia Borgia, who lived from 1480 to 1519, was the daughter of one of those popes and lived a colourful life replete with three high-profile marriages, charges of incestuous relations and an orgy thrown at the Vatican.
"I've only started off the screenplay, so I don't know when I will be ready to make the film," Jordan told The Irish Times yesterday. "It involves an extraordinary amount of research.
"But it's a very interesting project and I would like to make a large-budget European movie. They don't make big-scale European movies much anymore.
"The story of the Borgias has produced a play by Victor Hugo and an opera, and I think it could be a fascinating film. It's like The Godfather set in the Vatican."
The project is being developed for the Hollywood studio, DreamWorks, by ImageMovers.
Jordan, who won the best original screenplay Oscar for The Crying Game, recently received the BAFTA award for best adapted screenplay for his film of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair. His 14-minute film based on Samuel Beckett's play, Not I, had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last month.