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A movie about Pontius Pilate

A movie about Pontius Pilate

Last updated on: January 10, 2013 at 8:27 pm by Gene Veith

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A movie about Pontius Pilate 2013-01-10T20:27:32-05:00 Gene Veith

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This sounds like it has the potential to be a terrific movie. Mike Fleming has seen the script:

Brad Pitt is circling the title role in Warner Bros‘ Pontius Pilate, the drama about one of history’s most vilified figures. The studio acquired a script by Woman On Top scribe Vera Blasi with Mark Johnson producing through his Gran Via banner. Pitt is not committed, but it could well move that way quickly.

I revealed this project last summer, when the studio acquired Blasi’s script. I got hold of a draft and it’s very strong stuff and has the makings of a compelling period big budget film. This script follows the evolution of Lucius Pontius Pilate from the sensitive son of a Roman Knight into a ferocious soldier whose warrior exploits make him a general and puts him on a political track under the Roman Emperor Tiberius. Promised a military governorship in Egypt, Pilate is instead assigned by Tiberius to become the prefect of Judea, at a time when Jerusalem was a cauldron of religious tensions between various factions of the Jewish faith. Pilate veers from the political fast track into the express lane to hell and historical infamy. Rather than a straight ahead Biblical film, Blasi’s script reads almost like a Biblical era Twilight Zone episode in which a proud, capable Roman soldier gets in way over his head. His arrogance and inability to grasp the devoutness of the citizenry and its hatred for the Roman occupiers and their pagan gods leads him to make catastrophic decisions. All of this puts him in a desperate situation and in need of public approval when he is asked to decide the fate of a 33-year old rabbi accused by religious elders of claiming he is King of the Jews. Along the way, such Roman emperors including Caligula and Tiberius and New Testament figures like John the Baptist, Salome and Mary Magdalene are seen in a tale that culminates with Pilate’s fateful decision to allow Jesus Christ to be crucified.

via Brad Pitt Circling Biblical Epic Villain Turn In ‘Pontius Pilate’ At Warner Bros – Deadline.com.

This would not just be another Biblical costume drama. We know from extra-biblical sources that Pilate provoked riots for introducing what the Jews considered to be idols on his Roman standards, that the Emperor Tiberius rebuked him for unnecessarily and probably unintentionally antagonizing the people he was ruling, that he brutally suppressed acts of protest with the sword. A good movie about him would be about leadership and its failures, politics and government. A good actor–as Brad Pitt is when he wants to be–could turn this into a tragic character study. And then Jesus would come into it.

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