Bullhead's Roskam talks Buda Bridge, The Tiger, The Faithful

US director Michael Mann (Heat, Miami Vice) recently called Belgian director Michaël R. Roskam’s Oscar nominated Bullhead “the best film of the year.”

“That experience of Bullhead was quite extraordinary. Matthias Schonaerts is a brilliant, brilliant actor…the film is just stunning,” Mann enthused of the Flemish drama, which he saw while sitting on the Foreign Language Film selection committee for the Academy Awards. “It’s just a brilliant piece of work, terribly complex, very, very ambitious. It starts small and 13 or 14 minutes in, you realise you’re in the middle of some massive Greek tragedy.”

Now, Roskam has revealed further details of his ongoing collaboration with Mann on HBO series Buda Bridge Bitch.

Buda Bridge, as the series now seems likely to be called, will be executive produced by Mann and Mark Johnson. It will be shot in Brussels.

Roskam is currently at work writing the pilot. “There’s a 10% chance, maybe 5%, that it will become a series,” he emphasised the project was still at an early stage.

Speaking at the Binger-Screen International Interview this weekend in Utrecht, Roskam also discussed his other American project, The Tiger, an adaptation of the John Vaillant book. This is a true story of a tiger terrorising a remote part of Siberia.

“The book was bought by Plan B, Brad Pitt’s company. Darren Aronofsky was going to direct it but it didn’t work,” Roskam noted. “After him, Guillermo Arriaga was going to do to write the script.” Finally, the Belgian director revealed, the project was offered to him as a director.

“I do believe I have an approach where I can be completely myself, telling the story, based on this event,” Roskam said. He won’t be writing the film himself and the team is searching for a writer now.

Roskam has a third project, The Faithful, a film noir on which he will again be working with Bart van Langendonck’s Savage Films (the outfit behind Bullhead.) This is a drama set against the backdrop of the brutal gang warfare in Brussels in the early 1990s.

The director stated that he hoped to work with key collaborators like cinematographer Nicolas Karakatsanis and fast-rising actor Schoenaerts on his international projects. “I want a team,” he stated. “I believe you’re as good as the people you work with. I need those guys!”