HomeNewsSteven Spielberg Poised to Direct New Take on Steve McQueen’s Bullitt

Steven Spielberg Poised to Direct New Take on Steve McQueen’s Bullitt

They’re calling him Spielberg the Unstoppable. At a time when most of his peers seem content to spend their golden years in leisure activities, the 75-year-old filmmaker is showing no signs of trading his director’s chair for a rocking chair.

Hot on the heels of his triumphant West Side Story and the yet-to-be-released semi-autobiographical The Fabelmans, Spielberg is poised to direct a new Warner Bros. flick based on Bullitt, the 1968 crime thriller that starred Steve McQueen. Deadline reported the details this week, noting that this would not be a remake of the original film but “a new idea centered on the character.” In the original version, directed by Peter Yates, Frank Bullitt was depicted as a tough San Francisco cop trying to track down a murderous mobster. The film’s violent chase scene became legendary for its over-the-top choreography.

According to industry sources, Spielberg had been engaged for some time in intense negotiations with the McQueen estate over the rights to the story. Sources also report that Josh Singer has been tapped to write the script for the new Bullitt picture, which Spielberg will also co-produce with Kristie Macosko Krieger. Executive producers will be Steve McQueen’s son and granddaughter, Chad and Molly McQueen.

Of Ukrainian heritage, the indefatigable Spielberg earned accolades for many of his iconic films, including Jaws (1975), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Jurassic Park (1993), Schindler’s List (1993), and several pictures in the Indiana Jones series.

West Side Story, by the way, has already earned eight Oscar nominations, including best picture and two for Spielberg as director and producer. With its script co-written with Tony Kushner, The Fabelmans is scheduled for release around Thanksgiving. More than a half century ago, Peter Yates’s Bullitt won Oscars for editing and sound, and it was selected in 2007 for inclusion in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry as a film worthy of preservation for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” Seven of Spielberg’s films have already qualified for that honor.

Edward Moran
Edward Moranhttps://www.cinemadailyus.com
Edward Moran began his journalistic career many decades ago as a theater and cinema reviewer for Show Business and the New York Theater Review. More recently he contributed film reviews to hosokinema.com and Movie Sleuth. His writings have appeared in publications as diverse as the Times Literary Supplement, Publishers Weekly, the Paris Review, and the Massachusetts Review. Moran also edited a memoir by Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Christine Choy. He served as literary advisor to her film Hyam Plutzik: American Poet, which was the keynote film in the American Perspectives series at the 2007 Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin.

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