By Filmmaker Zack Snyder has long dreamed about doing a film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s politically charged 1943 novel “The Fountainhead”.
The story follows an iconoclastic architect named Howard Roark who struggles to pursue his creative vision and overcome critics and colleagues who doubt and undermine him.
The work, which some consider Rand’s best, is a precursor to Rand’s famous and contentious objectivist philosophy which puts ruthless individualism above any kind of collectivism. She would spell out the political and economic implications of her philosophy in her most famous novel “Atlas Shrugged”.
Snyder’s been trying to get a film adaptation done for several years and, as part of his recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast to talk about “Rebel Moon,” he revealed he spoke with a certain streamer about a new approach to the material – namely turning it into a TV series. However Netflix said no to that:
“We’ve talked about it a lot; I mean, nobody wants ‘Fountainhead,’ but that’s what I wanted to do. I pitched them ‘Fountainhead’ ’cause I’ve written this super adaptation of that book, and I just think it’s…I think it would be amazing, but no one wants to make it cause they think it’s… it’s like taboo. Ayn Rand is taboo… she’s taboo among the intelligentsia because they think she’s a fascist, and they think the book’s a piece of fascist propaganda.”
He says his own interest in the novel is the way it parallels with modern-day filmmaking and with artists having to battle against the commercial desires of the studios:
I happen to just like it because, to me, it’s a direct comment on making a movie – a movie about an architect who won’t make the buildings that everyone wants them to make. And the struggle he goes through to get the buildings made the way he wants to make them?
Of course, I like that. I’m sure there are plenty of movie directors who don’t like ‘Fountainhead,’ but I just think it just says so much. Ayn Rand wrote ‘Fountainhead’ in direct response to being noted on a script that she had written.
She had been studying this movie about skyscrapers, and she kept submitting versions of the script, and they kept noting her and noting her until it was unrecognizable, and she was like, ‘This is what happens to work,’ it gets noted until it disintegrates. So that’s one thing that I’ve always wanted to do, but I don’t know if the world will ever allow that.”
From the sounds of it, he’s no closer to actually getting the film made than he was several years ago. This fits with a quote from The New York Times he gave back in 2021 where he said the increasing political polarization in the United States means it made it less likely it could be done: “We need a less divided country and a little more liberal government to make that movie, so people don’t react to it in a certain way.”
Oliver Stone previously expressed interest in an adaptation back in the 2000s, but to date the only real big screen adaptation was the 1949 film starring Gary Cooper.
Source: The Joe Rogan Experience
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