It's little more than an aside in a bigger THR piece about Zack and Deborah Snyder's plans for the post-Batman V Superman DC movie universe. But it appears that, in rare moments of spare time, Zack Snyder is working on an adaptation of Ayn Rand's anti-utopian, anti-altruist novel The Fountainhead.
Rand's right-wing bible was previously filmed in 1949 by King Vidor, from a screenplay by the author herself. "Warner Bros. owns [that] script," Snyder explains, "and I’ve just been working on that a little bit. I've always felt like The Fountainhead was such a thesis on the creative process and what it is to create something."
The massive novel - 700-odd pages in Penguin Modern Classics - involves the doggedly individualist and capitalist architect Howard Roark. Roark wants to build a building that nobody else likes, but in the end, after many travails, it turns out he was right all along and his building is awesome. The principal antagonist to Roark is Ellsworth Toohey, a dastardly socialist.
Rand's other major work, the even more enormous Atlas Shrugged, was put together as an indie movie trilogy in recent years by exercise equipment entrepreneur John Aglialoro, who bought the rights for a million dollars in 1993. All three films were critically drubbed and commercially disastrous.
But there are hints that Snyder sees Roark's architectural righteousness as a metaphor for the filmmaking process and the auteur theory. "I love the idea that the individual filmmaker point of view is the thing that people want," he says, talking about the surprise success of Deadpool in the face of accepted film industry thinking.
Whatever, with parts one and two of Justice League in Snyder's immediate future, thoughts of other, non-DC projects are some way off. Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice is out next Friday.
Rand's The Fountainhead is, as we mentioned, published in the UK by Penguin Modern Classics. But don't buy it. Borrow it from a library, thus supporting your local public services.