‘All Quiet’ and ‘Night Manager’ Producers Join Forces on ‘The Eighth Life’ Adaptation (Exclusive)

Scott Roxborough
·3 min read

Germany’s Amusement Park, producers of the four-time Oscar winner All Quiet on the Western Front and Emmy-award winners The Ink Factory (The Night Manager, The Little Drummer Girl) are joining forces to adapt Nino Haratischvili’s international best-seller The Eighth Life as a television series.

The Eighth Life follows the epic and mythic saga of a Georgian family from 1900 to the beginning of the 21st century, following the rise and fall of the Soviet Union and the journey of generations from ancient, mountainous cave cities through the turbulent streets of Tbilisi and revolutionary Prague to 1960s Soho and modern-day Berlin.

More from The Hollywood Reporter

Sarah Lambert, who adapted Marele Day’s Lambs of God as an Australian limited series in 2019 for Lingo Pictures and Foxtel, and whose adaptation The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, based on the book by Holly Ringland and starring Sigourney Weaver and Asher Keddie, is set to hit screens courtesy of Amazon Studios, Made-Up Stories and Fifth Season, is attached as showrunner for The Eighth Life.

The series will be produced by Malte Grunert, Amelie von Kienlin and Susanne Kapitzky for Amusement Park; Simon Cornwell, Stephen Cornwell and Michele Wolkoff for The Ink Factory; and Maggie Boden.

“The Eighth Life is a bold, emotional and sovereign piece of literature that gives a strong voice to the women of that era and indeed of the present day. It screams to be adapted into a series,” said Amusement Park partners Grunert and Von Kienlin. “We are incredibly excited to become part of this ambitious project and to be partnering with our longtime collaborators at The Ink Factory, and the outstanding showrunner Sarah Lambert.”

The ambitious, English-language project has received a grant from Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, a German regional subsidy body, which should fast-track development.

“Nino Haratischvili’s book is timely, powerful and remarkable, and we are honored to have the opportunity to adapt it, together with our illustrious colleagues at Amusement Park and the multi-talented Sarah Lambert,” said The Ink Factory co-CEOs and founders Simon and Stephen Cornwell, describing the novel as “a War and Peace for the 21st century” and a “1,000-page masterpiece full of pain, joy and romance [which] has already established itself as one of the great works of literature of the last 50 years. We are grateful to the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg for their faith in this project and their shared vision of its extraordinary potential.”

“I am incredibly excited and grateful that The Eighth Life will be brought to another life by these wonderful people. I can’t wait to meet my characters onscreen,” Haratischvili said in a statement. “It’s a wonderful odyssey that I’ve been looking forward to for so long, and the fact that it’s now starting to take shape, that the great Sarah is taking on the book to translate it into another medium, makes me look forward to the future with hope and joy.”

Amusement Park was a co-producer on The Ink Factory’s 2014 feature A Most Wanted Man directed by Anthony Corbijn and starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rachel McAdams and Daniel Brühl, based on John le Carré’s best-seller. Brühl is a partner at Amusement Park, alongside founder Grunert, Amelie von Kienlin and Klaus Dohle. The two companies are also currently collaborating on a series version of A Most Wanted Man, which Snabba Cash creator Oskar Söderlund is adapting for the small screen.

Best of The Hollywood Reporter

Click here to read the full article.