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Emmerich to Tackle Shakespeare Next

Hot off his monster hit, 2012, director Roland Emmerich will shift gears with his next feature, a smaller, more intimate pet project he has wanted to make for years: SOUL OF THE AGE, which tackles the controversial authorship of William Shakespeare's plays.

Hot off his monster hit, 2012, director Roland Emmerich will shift gears with his next feature, a smaller, more intimate pet project he has wanted to make for years: SOUL OF THE AGE, which tackles the controversial authorship of William Shakespeare's plays.

Scripted by John Orloff (BAND OF BROTHERS), SOUL OF THE AGE explores the theory that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was the true author of Shakespeare's works.

According to Uncharted Territory's Volker Engel and Marc Weigert, the visual effects supervisors and co-producers of 2012, SOUL OF THE AGE will be shot entirely in Berlin, even though the story obviously takes place in London. Engel and Weigert are on board as co-producers once again and are already planning the vfx.

"We have a five-week pre-production phase just before Christmas where we're going to have five of our best artists that we've ever worked with and get everybody together in Berlin," Engel told VFXWORLD. "And we're gonna test the newest software for projection matte painting and all these kinds of things for us to do London in the 16th century because you can never really do it when you're in the middle of production."

Bill Desowitz's picture

Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.