The first broadcaster to bite was France Télévisions, which liked the way the script developed the backstory of Fogg and his companion Passepartout so they are more fully rounded characters than they were in the films and the book, and adds the female character of aspiring journalist Abigail Fix, who reports on their extraordinary journey. “I thought that pitching it as an idea wouldn’t work, but getting a script written and then pitching it was the way to go,” says Crawford Collins. A script was then commissioned with Caleb Ranson (Child Of Mine, Heartless) and Ashley Pharoah (Life On Mars, Ashes To Ashes) leading a team of writers. Around the World in 80 Days was picked out for being a title that everyone knew, but with a story that was less familiar. The idea for adapting the novel followed a ‘bookshop trawl’ by Slim’s development team. “The designer was almost in tears,” says Crawford Collins. Everything is on the move.” For example, an ‘amazing’ New York street set which took two months to build in Romania was filmed on for just three hours. “Nothing is ever in the same place – it all involves trains, boats, camels. He describes it as a like an 1872-set road trip. It was a beast of a production, says executive producer Simon Crawford Collins of Slim Film + Television. At various points there were up to 3,000 people working on the show. With a budget of around £40 million, the TV series negotiated Covid-19 lockdowns to film in Romania and South Africa where massive sets were built to recreate 1870s London, Paris, New York as well as an Indian hillside village, Arabian desert, the streets of Hong Kong, a Wild West town and a Pacific island. Published in 1872, Jules Vernes’ classic Around the World in 80 Days famously centres on Phileas Fogg accepting an almost impossible wager – to circumnavigate the globe in just eighty days.Īdapted in 1956 as an Oscar winning film starring David Niven and then in 2004 with Steve Coogan in the lead, it’s now coming to television screens following an international shoot that sounds almost as impossible as the book’s original wager. Slim Film + TV had already taken on a mammoth task with its remake of the Jules Verne classic – And then Covid struck.
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