After The Way Of The Gun fired mostly blanks at the box office, we were worried that Christopher McQuarrie might not get a proper shot at writing and directing a decent film again.
But we’re happy to see that Maverick Films has handed him the job of directing Stanford Prison Experiment this coming April.
McQuarrie wrote the script with Tim Talbot, which is based on the infamous human behaviour study conducted in the early 1970s. It saw a group of US college students taking on the roles of prisoners and guards to study the effects of incarceration. Within a day, the “guards” resorted to psychological torture and humiliation and the “prisoners” began to riot.
It’s been a cultural touchstone for years – and several films based on the subject have been grinding away in the Development Slammer for years. The most recent, loosely based drama was Oliver Hirschbiegel’s fictionalised 2001 version known as The Experiment.
Sounds like chewy stuff for McQuarrie to get stuck into. Now all he needs is a cast.