The BAFTA-winning and Salford born writer-director Mike Leigh has announced that he will be making a film about the infamous Peterloo Massacre of 1819.
Leigh, in an exclusive interview with Screen Magazine, The BAFTA-winning writer-director, said that he intends to shoot the film in 2017 and will re-team with DoP Dick Pope, who was Oscar-nominated for his camerawork on last year’s Cannes Competition title Mr. Turner.
“There has never been a feature film about the Peterloo Massacre,” Leigh said. “Apart from the universal political significance of this historic event, the story has a particular personal resonance for me, as a native of Manchester and Salford.”
According to the magazine, “Re-joining Leigh and his regular producer Georgina Lowe will be Mr. Turner executive producer Gail Egan (The Constant Gardener) and the same film’s assistant producer Helen Grearson, who will serve as associate producer.
“The film, currently in development with Film4, is being lined up as the director’s biggest budget feature to date after latest effort Mr. Turner became the filmmaker’s biggest-grossing title to date, taking more than £6.8m in the UK alone.”
The events at Peter’s Fields in August 1819 are firmly embedded in Manchester’s history when eighteen people were killed and over six hundred were injured during a peaceful demonstration for electoral reform.
Local magistrates, watching from a window near the field, panicked at the sight of the large crowd assembled and read the riot act, effectively ordering what little of the crowd could hear them to disperse.
The Yeoman’s guard, allegedly fuelled by drink charged with bayonets fixed into a field of over fifty thousand who had gathered that Monday morning to hear speakers call for parliamentary reform.
The events of that day would inspire Shelley to write his poem which was banned for thirty years, and would be dubbed Peterloo, after the battle of Waterloo four years earlier.
