Yellow Bird set to make €11.4m Millennium project
by Annika Pham
Swedish production company Yellow Bird is making a screen adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s best-selling Millennium trilogy novels for an estimated SEK 106m (€11.4m)
Danish filmmaker Niels Arden Oplev – behind the critical and commercial success We Shall Overcome [+see also:
trailer
film profile], as well as several episodes of the TV series The Eagle – is set to start filming the first instalment of the trilogy, Men Who Hate Women, in spring 2008. No director has been named yet for the other two crime novel adaptations, The Girl Who Plays With Fire and The Air Castle That Blew Up, which will be made for television and DVD.
Larsson’s Millennium trilogy has sold over two million copies in Sweden alone and has topped the charts in Norway, Denmark, Germany and France.
Danish screenwriters Rasmus Heisterberg and Nikolaj Arcel, who collaborated on Arcel’s feature, The Island of Lost Souls [+see also:
trailer
film profile], will work on the first two adaptations and Ulf Ryberg on the third.
The two lead characters in the novels, Inspector Mikael Blomkvist and IT hacker Lisbeth Salander, will be played respectively by Swedish star Michael Nykvist and up-and-coming Swedish actress Noomi Rapace.
Owned since February 2007 by Sweden’s Zodiak TV, Yellow Bird has found a niche in best-selling book adaptations. The company previously brought to the screen Henning Mankell’s Wallander series, as well as Helen Tursten’s Irene Huss novels.
“Our focus at Yellow Bird is on high quality crime films and TV series based on well-written books, not only police investigations, but crime stories in general,” said Søren Stærmose, producer and development executive at Yellow Bird.
The Millennium project is co-produced by Nordisk Film (which holds Scandinavian distribution rights) and by the Swedish, Danish and German public broadcasters SVT, DR, and ZDF.
Stærmose said that total financing has not been finalized and that Yellow Bird hopes to bring on board regional and national film institutes from Scandinavia. No sales agent has been appointed yet.
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