Christopher Hampton is in talks to write a screenplay with French director Anne Fontaine about iconic feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Nelson Algren’s transatlantic affair.
De Beauvoir and Algren met in Chicago in 1947 and immediately embarked on a passionate affair that endured for more than 20 years in spite of the complications of transatlantic travel and communication at the time.
Paris-based intellectual de Beauvoir was in the midst of completing her seminal 1949 feminist work The Second Sex and still committed to her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, who was her partner for 51 years until his death in 1980.
Algren is best known for his 1949 novel The Man With The Golden Arm which was bought to the big screen in 1955 by Otto Preminger, with Frank Sinatra in the lead role of a man trying to break his drug addiction, opposite Kim Novak.
“We had an initial discussion followed by a more detailed discussion a week ago. I really want to do it,” said Hampton, who revealed he was in the early stages of the project during a masterclass at the Doha Film Institute’s Qumra event on Monday.
Hampton previously worked with Coco Before Chanel director Fontaine on the 2013 film Adoration. The film is being developed by French The Father lead producer Philippe Carcassonne, who is also Fontaine’s partner.
Talking to Deadline after the masterclass, Hampton said the feature is likely to focus on the early years of their affair from 1948 to 1952.
“Her biography is a massive story,” he said. “It’s when their fame was rising she was writing The Second Sex and the political situation was pretty volatile at the time.”
He said the screenplay will draw on de Beauvoir’s 300 letters in English to Algren over the course of the relationship, which are gathered in the work, A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren.
“There’s a wealth of material. There’s a whole book of her letters but what I am trying to get hold of which is quite hard to see and I might not succeed are his letters to her,” said Hampton.
The writer revealed he would like the project to be multi-lingual.
“I very much want all the scenes in America to be in English and all the scenes in France to be in French. The language and their language difficulties formed part of the relationship and the reasons that the relationship finally broke down,” he said.
In other projects on the boil, Hampton said he was still holding out hopes for a big-screen version of his play White Chameleon, inspired by his childhood in Alexandria in the early 1950s.
The writer revealed that Egyptian producer Mohamed Hefzy is currently attached to the project which is looking for finance.
