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Danny Boyle joins growing contingent of mainstream filmmakers working in TV

[Image via Fox Searchlight]
[Image via Fox Searchlight]

Danny Boyle is the latest mainstream filmmaker to take the plunge into the world of television, as it has been announced that his next project will be on the small instead of the big screen.

Production on ‘Trust’ will begin as early as June, with FX set to premiere the show in January 2018. The 10-episode long season focuses on the 1973 kidnapping of oil fortune heir John Paul Getty III, and it will be shot in both London and Rome.

FX have also provided a description for ‘Trust’, courtesy of USA Today, which reads, “’Trust’ charts the young man’s nightmare ordeal at the hands of kidnappers who cannot understand why nobody seems to want their captive back. The Italian police think it’s a prank and decline to investigate. Paul’s father is lost in a heroin daze in London and refuses to answer the phone.”

“Paul’s grandfather – possibly the richest man in the world – is marooned in a Tudor mansion in the English countryside surrounded by five mistresses and a pet lion. He’s busy. Only Paul’s mother is left to negotiate with increasingly desperate kidnappers. Problem is, she’s broke.”

This project has actually been in development over at FX for the last year, while screenwriter Simon Beaufoy and producer Christian Colson have reunited with Danny Boyle on ‘Trust’, with the trio having previously worked together on the Academy Award winning ‘Slumdog Millionaire’.

Once again cinema’s loss is television’s gain, as Danny Boyle joins the likes of David Fincher, Martin Scorsese, and the Coen Brothers in moving to the medium. While out promoting the release of ‘T2 Trainspotting’ in America Boyle opened up about why he has moved to television, insisting that its potential for storytelling is now far greater.

“You look at the variety of the storytelling, it’s phenomenal,” Danny Boyle told IndieWire. “And that has dried up in cinema, for sure. What’s extraordinary is the money equation is different. I mean, [TV is] not stupid with money, but they’re also not on your back the whole time saying, ‘Shave, shave, shave, shave.’ Which obviously the [film] studios are.”

This is just the beginning, though. Because while Danny Boyle only plans on directing two or three episodes of this first season, he’s on board to executive produce the rest, while its hoped that there will be four further seasons, each of which will cover a different decade in the life of the Gettys. Boyle also hopes to mix-up the show’s chronology over these seasons, each of which will have different casts, allowing characters to overlap as it continues.