Fernando Meirelles circles Peter Morgan’s 360

Deadline reports that City of God director Fernando Meirelles has signed on to direct 360, a Peter Morgan-scripted drama based on the scandalous 1900 play, Reigen.

Wiki gives us some background on Arthur Schnitzler, the author of the source material:

His works were often controversial, both for their frank description of sexuality (Sigmund Freud, in a letter to Schnitzler, confessed “I have gained the impression that you have learned through intuition ‚Äî though actually as a result of sensitive introspection ‚Äî everything that I have had to unearth by laborious work on other persons”)

Schnitzler was branded as a pornographer after the release of his play Reigen, in which ten pairs of characters are shown before and after the sexual act, leading and ending with a prostitute. The furor after this play was couched in the strongest anti-semitic terms; his works would later be cited as “Jewish filth” by Adolf Hitler. Reigen was made into a French language film in 1950 by the German-born director Max Ophuls as La Ronde. The film achieved considerable success in the English-speaking world, with the result that Schnitzler’s play is better known there under Ophuls’ French title.

If the name Arthur Schnitzler sparks a factoid neuron in the movie files of your brain, maybe you recall he’s the author Traumnovelle (Dream Story, 1926), the inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s last film Eyes Wide Shut.