Vikings and The Tudors creator Michael Hirst has revealed to The Guardian that he is set to team with filmmaker Martin Scorsese for a new series entitled The Caesars, with a plan to tell the story of the early rulers of Rome across several seasons, beginning with the rise of Julius Caesar.
“In the movies he [Caesar] is usually a middle-aged guy, struggling with political complexities,” states Hirst. “But he was fantastically interesting and ambitious when he was younger. A lot of the Caesars came to power when they were young, and we’ve never really seen that on screen. It’s the energy, the vitality, the excess of a young culture that’s being driven by young people. There is something astonishing about the rise of a relatively small kingdom to world power within a very short space of time. It couldn’t have been done by tired old politicos and faded warriors.”
Hirst went on to stress that the series will take some liberties with regards to historical accuracy, adding that: “Just like Shakespeare’s history plays, they only start with some historical facts, then the drama takes over. You can’t have both.”
He also spoke about Scorsese’s passion for the period, revealing that the filmmaker has long had ambitions of producing a film or TV drama about the Roman Empire: “He genuinely loves the period and knows a lot about it. He got on the phone to Justin Pollard, my historical adviser. They chatted, partly in Latin, about sources for the stories and Roman poetry.”
The pilot episode for The Caesars has already been written, as has an outline for the remainder of the first season, and the plan is for production to get underway in 2019.
