VLAD Is Not About Vampires

Just last weekend it was announced that Summit wants to make another Vampire movie, the project is called VLAD, actor Charlie Hunnam wrote the script which was recently bought and Brad Pitt is producing with Dede Gardner via Plan B Entertainment. Historic Vlad III The Impaler, his name, Romanian: Vlad Ţepeş or Dracula inspired the name of the vampire in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. But here’s the thing, this movie VLAD is not going to feature, it’s not going to touch, it’s not going to be about vampires at all..

Actor/Scribe Charlie Hunnam (TV’s Sons Of Anarchy) spoke to EW and explained that vampire is out of the question, the plot is going to be about VLAD The Impaler, his rise to power and brutality and it’s going to be more like Braveheart than 300 or a combo of both

As the script stands now, we don’t touch on vampirism. That was my one non-negotiable area when we were developing it, and thankfully, nobody suggested that we should delve into it at the end. But you can clearly see the things that Bram Stoker took…. Vlad was such a brutal man, and the trick is to make him sympathetic. That was the challenge, and if we’ve succeeded in any way in this script, I truly believe that it’s genuinely making him sympathetic. He was doing what he thought was right. He was the one who was being invaded and whose religious beliefs were being stripped away. Vlad met the Sultan three times in battle through the course of his life and at any time he meant him, he was outnumbered 5 to 1. A lot of his brutality just came out of military necessity — shock tactics and fear tactics to give him the upper hand, because he just couldn’t meet them man-to-man.

How do you humanize or better yet how do you sympathize with a man who was known more for killing thousands of people by driving a long stake through their bodies? Judging from the extensive interview, it’s obvious that Hunnam has done his research well on VLAD even to the point of admiration.
I would end up liking ballerina first before I find myself idolizing Ivan The Terrible.
But Hunnam spoke more about his plans…

It’s a very big and sweeping story. The majority of time focuses on him as a young man assuming his rule as a prince, but we actually go all the way through his life. Basically what happened was, the Ottoman Empire was expanding at an exponentially fast rate with a father-son duo of sultans, who increased the size of their territory tenfold within 50 years. They got over the Danube into Wallachia, which is the southern part of modern-day Romania. Romania used to be three separate principalities: Wallachia, Transylvania, and Moldavia.
the entire first act. You see them as children, you see the war, you get introduced to the Ottoman Empire, the deal is made, the children are taken, and then you see how differently each of them reacts to being held in the Ottoman court. The first act break is cutting from them being children to them being adults — and then all hell breaks loose

You can read the rest OVER THERE
As far as who Hunnam wants playing VLAD, he’s thinking bad boy Colin Farrell would be perfect. That’s a decent idea but then again, Farell played The Great Alexander and that didn’t turn out quite well.
Summit is in talks with music video and photographer Anthony Mandler to direct the project.