What Lies Beneath

Following swiftly on from the BBC's recent depiction of the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum by the eruption of Vesuvius, Hollywood is making preparations to film its own big screen treatment of the ancient disaster. Fernando Meirelles, director of the fabulous City of God will direct the film. But what particularly tickled Empire Online's fancy was that the scriptwriter for the project, Clark Gregg, is perhaps best known for his screenplay for What Lies Beneath - entirely appropriate given the eventual fate of Pompeii. 'Neither Fernando nor I are jumping out of our skin to do a traditional historical epic or disaster film,' writer Gregg tells Variety today. 'What's fascinating about Pompeii is that it was frozen in a moment in time.' And the filmmakers are intending to recreate that moment in time in the most realistic way possible, says Meirelles. 'One of my goals is to take the audience into the everyday life experiences in the Mediterranean 1,924 years ago. I'm also interested in capturing the connections between the end of Roman Empire and the present day, as well as the end of a civilization.'