Fremantle Taps Talent to Adapt Deep North Novel

Fremantle has signed Australian director Justin Kurzel and screenwriter Shaun Grant to lead the series adaption of Richard Flanagan’s novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

A winner of the Man Booker Prize, The Narrow Road to the Deep North provides a portrait of a man and the woman he loves and offers a humanist examination of what links us all, forged through the savagery of war. Jo Porter, Fremantle’s director of scripted, will produce the limited series.

Porter and Chris Oliver-Taylor, CEO of Fremantle in Australia, said: “Richard Flanagan’s novel has been hailed as a masterpiece around the world. It had an immensely powerful impact on readers in Australia and was a bestseller globally. We needed a screenwriter and a director creatively at the top of their game to bring this tragic, heroic and remarkable story to the screen. Justin and Shaun are audacious, bold and share our passion for this project. We are thrilled to announce they will be working with us to realize our ambitions for the series.”

Kurzel said: “I feel extremely honored to be trusted by Richard Flanagan to bring to life this complete masterpiece of a novel. I am so excited to be collaborating again with Shaun Grant and can’t wait to work with the Fremantle team in creating such an epic and incredibly powerful story.”

Grant said: “Having read Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North several years ago, and being moved beyond words, I am excited to adapt his sublime novel for the screen. My grandfather was a Prisoner of War, who worked the Thai-Burma railway, hence this project is very dear to my heart.”

Flanagan said: “I am genuinely delighted. Justin Kurzel is rightly considered to be one of the most exciting directors in world cinema today, and Shaun Grant is a marvelous writer of equivalent talent who brings to the project a deep personal connection. It feels very right to me and I have a suspicion that the resulting series may just be astonishing.”