With Zack Snyder preparing to unleash Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice on the world on March 25, he’s spoken to The Hollywood Reporter about the future R-rated edition of the film, as well as what his non-DC Extended Universe future holds. Those future projects include The Last Photograph, a film about a war photographer in Afghanistan, and an adaptation of Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel “The Fountainhead.”

“I have been working on ‘The Fountainhead,'” Snyder confirmed. “I’ve always felt like ‘The Fountainhead’ was such a thesis on the creative process and what it is to create something. Warner Bros. owns [Ayn Rand’s] script and I’ve just been working on that a little bit.”

The script he’s referring to is the one Rand wrote for King Vidor’s 1949 adaptation starring Gary Cooper, which bombed at the box office and which the author later disavowed. The book, about an architect named Howard Rourke who strives to go against the grain in service of a more modern style of building, is a cornerstone of Rand’s controversial Objectivist philosophy, based around “rational self-interest” and no doubt front-and-center on Donald Trump’s bookshelf right next to his copy of My New Order. That said, Snyder adapting the book doesn’t necessarily pin him as an Objectivist, as he previously adapted Frank Miller’s fascistic 300 and Alan Moore’s humanistic Watchmen, the two creators on polar opposite sides of the political spectrum. It could simply be Snyder responding to the grandiosity and design challenge of bringing yet another “unfilmable” novel to the screen.

Oscar-winning The Deer Hunter filmmaker Michael Cimino penned a screenplay of The Fountainhead in the mid-seventies with Clint Eastwood in mind for the Rourke part, but the failure of Heaven’s Gate took the wind out of his sails. In the early 2000s, Francis Ford Coppola attempted to mount his dream project Megalopolis, a story with an architect protagonist heavily inspired by Rourke, but the massive budget proved unattainable.

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