Christopher Nolan's next film, set to release in 2026, is thought to be an adaptation of 1960s Brit classic The Prisoner. Photo / Warner Bros
Christopher Nolan's next film, set to release in 2026, is thought to be an adaptation of 1960s Brit classic The Prisoner. Photo / Warner Bros
OPINION
The Oppenheimer director’s new film, rumoured to star Matt Damon, is cloaked in secrecy. But, wonders the Telegraph’s Alexander Larman, could a 1960s sci-fi series offer a clue?
The welcome news that Christopher Nolan’s next film will be released on July 17 2026 – a lucky date for the filmmaker, who has launched most of his pictures on or around then since The Dark Knight opened in 2008 – has been greeted with delight by cinephiles everywhere. At a time when most auteur directors are crashing and burning with their personal projects, Nolan has enjoyed a charmed career – 2020′s pandemic-blighted Tenet aside – that peaked with last year’s Oscar-winning, billion-dollar-grossing Oppenheimer. It was heartening proof that an uncompromising and hugely accomplished picture could still attract a huge mainstream audience on the basis of its filmmaker’s name.
It is unsurprising that Nolan has chosen to remain with Universal, the studio that took Oppenheimer to such great success. He will be reuniting with his regular collaborator Matt Damon, who took an uncredited but pivotal role in Interstellar and a larger supporting part in Oppenheimer and will now be stepping up to his first Nolan lead. It’s a fitting reward for an actor who had promised his wife that he would take an extended break from acting unless Christopher Nolan rang him to offer a part, which he did, with the role of General Leslie Groves, Oppenheimer’s sceptical but supportive military liaison.
Other than these small nuggets of news, the latest Nolan endeavour remains typically secretive and opaque. There are, as usual, countless rumours swirling around; Nolan has suggested in the past that he would like to direct a horror film, if he came up with “a really exceptional idea”, and the casting of the all-American Damon in a Nicholson-in-The Shining-esque role would be fascinating. Likewise, one of Nolan’s great unmade passion projects is a biopic of the filmmaker, tycoon and aviator Howard Hughes; he was beaten to the punch by Martin Scorsese two decades ago with The Aviator, went off to make Batman instead, and the rest is history. Yet there’s another Nolan picture that has often been rumoured, and now might be coming back into focus: none other than an adaptation of the cult Sixties show The Prisoner.
Matt Damon and Christopher Nolan are rumoured to be working on Nolan's 2026 film. Photo / Getty Images
When the first episode of The Prisoner aired on ITV on 29 September 1967 – towards the end of the Summer of Love, and four months after the Beatles released Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – audiences may well have thought they knew what to expect. They would soon be surprised. Its star, Patrick McGoohan, had become a household name through the popular spy series Danger Man, in which he’d played the international secret agent John Drake; it made him the highest-paid actor on British television and gave him enough clout to turn down the roles of James Bond and Simon Templar in The Saint.
McGoohan, a talented but determined actor who believed the contract he had signed for Danger Man had left him unfairly compromised, decided to end the popular show after four series and a total of 86 episodes. When its producer Lew Grade asked McGoohan if he would work on “something” for him afterwards, the actor offered to create and star in a spiritual sequel of sorts to Danger Man – The Prisoner. It would feature an anonymous British spy, known only as “Number Six”, who, after resigning from his job in espionage, is drugged, kidnapped and before awakening in an Orwellian encampment known as “The Village”, where individuality and free will are suppressed at all costs. This sits badly with Number Six, who, in one of the show’s best-known lines, declares, “I am not a number! I am a free man!” only to be met with mocking laughter.
Judged by the standards of the popular entertainment of the day, The Prisoner was astonishingly demanding and difficult. It was closer to the European arthouse cinema of Alain Resnais and Luis Bunuel than it was to most of Lew Grade’s breezy output. Despite the presence of such popular character actors as Donald Sinden, Fenella Fielding and Peter Wyngarde – as well as Leo McKern as the show’s main antagonist, Village administrator Number Two – it was very un-British in everything from its location shooting (it was filmed in Portmeirion in North Wales, although not credited as such until its final episode) to its use of colour, then largely reserved for cinema and American television.
McGoohan was credited as “creator” of the show rather than its writer, and over the course of its enigmatic, perplexing and fascinating 17 episodes, very little was ever explained as to how its protagonist had arrived at his predicament. By the time the series finale aired on February 1, 1968, the anticipation that something – anything – would be explained had grown so feverish that, when the Kafkaesque conclusion appeared to suggest that Number Six, who has apparently escaped from the Village, is in fact stuck in a Sisyphean cycle from which he can never leave, McGoohan received so many outraged letters that he had to go into hiding for a while.
Although McGoohan continued to act, direct and produce throughout his long career – including playing a magnificently threatening Edward I in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart – it was The Prisoner that became his defining role, and one that he good-naturedly acknowledged in the 2000 Simpsons episode The Computer Wore Menace Shoes, when he played a version of Number Six opposite Homer Simpson’s Number Five, forever trying and failing to escape from his captivity.
The continued cult following of The Prisoner was such amongst filmmakers that Con Air director Simon West expressed an interest in making an adaptation of it as early as 1999, with McGoohan as an executive producer. But West’s popcorn sensibilities were unsuited to such a complex project, and, with memories of the total failure of the Ralph Fiennes-Uma Thurman film adaptation of The Avengers still fresh, the project was abandoned.
Patrick McGoohan. Photo / Getty Images
Nolan was first formally linked to a screen adaptation of The Prisoner in 2006, when the film magazine Variety announced he would direct a “contemporised transformation” after finishing work on The Dark Knight. He would have been working from a script by David Webb Peoples, who wrote Unforgiven and Blade Runner, and Peoples’ wife Janet, with whom he wrote Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys. The Peoples had established themselves as go-to screenwriters for intelligent, uncompromising sci-fi (David also wrote the Kurt Russell flop Soldier, which is best passed over) and given Nolan’s enduring affection for Blade Runner, which he has cited as a major influence throughout his career, it would have been a meeting of minds.
It is also easy to see why he was so drawn to The Prisoner. McGoohan’s show may be demanding, but it also has its own clear (if twisted) logic, as it carefully and wittily dismantles the accessible tenets of Danger Man in favour of something more warped. Kafka and Orwell were the writers most often cited as the basis behind the show, but there was also a significant debt to the Argentine short story writer Jorge Luis Borges, whose elliptical narratives of infinity, mirror images and labyrinthine structures repeating on one another would prove to be one of the major influences on Nolan himself. Most of his major films, including Memento, Inception and Tenet, play with the idea of time, situation and memory as being prisons that its inhabitants cannot escape from, no matter how hard they try, and this was equally true of Borges’ work and of The Prisoner itself.
Nolan’s Inception is remarked for its inventive and innovative special effects that defies and ridicules the laws of physics.
Unfortunately, the Nolan re-imagining of The Prisoner fell apart a couple of years after it was announced, mainly because the show was remade for TV by AMC in 2009, and filmed in southern Africa rather than Portmeirion. It now starred Jim Caviezel as Number Six, with Ian McKellen in a more obviously antagonistic role as Number Two and a starry supporting cast that included Hayley Atwell, Ruth Wilson and Lennie James. It was made without McGoohan’s involvement; the now-ailing actor was offered a cameo in the first episode as an elderly man vainly fleeing from pursuing guards but declined, saying that he would take the role of Number Two but nothing else. After his death, his widow said, “They wanted Patrick to have some part in it, but he adamantly didn’t want to be involved. He had already done it.”
The show was not a success, with most critics concurring that it could neither capture the creative shock of the original nor add anything of any significance to it, and it was widely regarded as a disappointment. Yet a film remake of The Prisoner continued to attract interest. Ridley Scott was attached to the project in 2016, with a script written by his Kingdom of Heaven collaborator William Monahan, but, like so many films Scott has had his name associated with, it never came to pass. It was not until this year, with Nolan a newly minted Oscar winner, that rumours began to grow that an adaptation of the series would be his next project, leaving the Peoples’ script behind in favour of an original one he had written himself.
There is, as yet, no official confirmation that this will be Nolan’s next film, and the director may well wish to tackle an entirely new project, whether it’s another historical epic in the vein of Oppenheimer or Dunkirk or another mind-bending extravaganza like Inception or Tenet. Yet the opportunity to return to The Prisoner may be too tempting for the filmmaker to pass up. The casting of Damon – Jason Bourne himself – would have a similarly tongue-in-cheek quality to the appearance of McGoohan, fresh from Danger Man, in the original show. The opportunity to take the no-doubt-colossal Universal budget he will be offered and do something fresh and exciting with it – helped by the usual roster of the Nolan repertoire company – may be irresistible.
Still, this most individualistic of filmmakers remains his own man – very much not a number – and only time will tell whether the denials that Nolan is making this picture are true or yet another, appropriately Prisoner-esque, piece of misdirection.
