LOS ANGELES – When Harvey Weinstein was 12 years old, an eye injury sustained while playing cowboys and Indians kept him temporarily sidelined from neighborhood games and school. He filled the time by tackling a neighbor's copy of Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace," the Ironman of novels, a self-imposed assignment that accelerated his passion for Russian literature and storytelling in general.
The anecdote could have just developed into a pickup line at a book club, except that Weinstein grew up to be one of Hollywood's most powerful producers, a position he has used to put his considerable weight behind a new take on the novel, to be aired over four weeks simultaneously on three networks.
"It was a great triumph for me to get through 'War and Peace' at such a young age and love it," said Weinstein, taking a breather last week from flogging his company's Oscar contenders, "Carol" and "The Hateful Eight." "That's why I pursued this."
Weinstein and the international cast, which includes Paul Dano, Gillian Anderson and Jim Broadbent, have their work cut out for them.
There have been several attempts to adapt the epic classic, most notably a 1956 film starring Henry Fonda and Audrey Hepburn. That project, like others, failed to capture the essence of the book that, on the surface, is about how cocky Russia in the early 19th century underestimated the Tao of Napoleon. But even a first-year literature student can tell you the work doesn't follow anything close to a standard story line, with so many dead ends and unanswered questions that even die-hard "Lost" fans would cry foul. Tolstoy himself refused to call his masterpiece a novel, opting instead for the term "philosophy discussion."
Tom Harper, who directed the entire miniseries, said screenwriter Andrew Davies ("Bleak House") cracked the code by not succumbing to the pressure to cram every one of Tolstoy's 1,125 pages into the script.
"Andrew has a phenomenal instinct for finding the things that interest him and putting them together in a way that's quite amazing," said Harper, who shot the film in Lithuania, Latvia and Russia over the course of six months. "Once you take out these big chunks of philosophy and military strategy, it becomes a love story, a search for meaning."
Not that the cast didn't go back to school. Dano, who plays head-in-the-clouds aristocrat Pierre, owns several copies of the book, including a first edition of the initial English.
