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The Matt With The Hole

Damon to play Marco Polo?


Empire Award winner Matt Damon is clearly on top of the world. After winning the ultimate accolade (Oscars? Pah!), and lining up a raft of projects that most stars can only dream about (Syriana with George Clooney, The Brothers Grimm for Terry Gilliam, The Departed with Scorsese and The Good Shepherd for Robert De Niro) Matt is adding to the pile, by entering negotiations to play Marco Polo, in a historical epic about the great explorer.

As most of you will remember from primary school history lessons, Marco Polo travelled extensively in the Far East in the late 13th / early 14th centuries. From his home in Venice, he followed in the footsteps of his father and uncle, and visited the court of the great Kublai Khan, travelling widely throughout China and the Middle East. He was essentially the first travel journalist, returning to write a detailed and lively travelogue that became both an immediate bestseller and a historical source of considerable importance even today. Whether many of his stories were true is still a subject of debate, but hey! Nobody’s perfect.

The film will be based on his book, The Travels of Marco Polo, as well as a book proposal by Laurence Bergreen, which Warners, the studio behind the project, has acquired. William Monahan, who wrote Kingdom of Heaven and also The Departed, will write the script.

So, will this be a film with all the beauty of medieval Venice and the vast scope of the Gobi Desert? Or will it have all the beauty of medieval plumbing and the vast scope of medieval nuclear physics? Well, Ridley Scott recently called Monahan the finest writer he has ever worked with, which is a pretty strong recommendation, and Kingdom Of Heaven demonstrated conclusively that he’s a man who does his homework, which bodes well. And Damon certainly seems to be on a roll – we’ll be keeping a close eye on this one, and bring you more as we get it.