Anthony McCarten has built a screenwriting career on the drama of powerful men negotiating in closed rooms — Churchill facing down his war cabinet in Darkest Hour, two pontiffs circling each other over a shared church in The Two Popes, the brittle geniuses of The Theory of Everything. The Price of Peace hands him the most literal version of that premise yet, and, tellingly, the director’s chair to stage it: the 1945 Potsdam Conference, where three victors sat down to carve up a ruined continent across a single table.

As Deadline reports, the four-time Oscar-nominated writer directs Guy Pearce as Harry Truman, Jared Harris as Winston Churchill and Merab Ninidze as Joseph Stalin — the men who met outside a flattened Berlin to decide what the postwar order would look like. Ninidze, a Georgian actor, brings a native register to a Georgian-born Stalin; Harris, long a connoisseur of brittle authority from Mad Men to Chernobyl, is an almost inevitable Churchill.

There is a neat symmetry in that last piece of casting. McCarten already wrote Churchill once — the version that won Gary Oldman an Academy Award — and now restages the man at the opposite end of the war, exhausted and about to be voted out of office mid-conference. Writing a figure and then directing a different actor into him is its own kind of authorship, and Potsdam, where Churchill left halfway through to be replaced by Clement Attlee, is the bleak bookend to the 1940 defiance McCarten dramatized before.

The newest additions sharpen what the film is really about. Mia Threapleton, fresh off Wes Anderson‘s The Phoenician Scheme, joins as Mary Churchill, the prime minister’s daughter and wartime aide, while Danny Huston plays General Leslie Groves, military head of the Manhattan Project. Groves is the tell: Potsdam is where Truman received word that the first atomic test had succeeded and had to choose how much to reveal to Stalin — the quiet negotiation that opened the Cold War.

Principal photography has now begun in London, with the shoot also set to reach Potsdam before a planned 2027 delivery. The film is produced by Raccoon Features, Muse of Fire Productions, Salloway Studios, Spark Productions and Ingara, with SND handling French distribution and co-representing US rights alongside CAA Media Finance — a broad transatlantic package for a story about the last moment those two blocs were nominally on the same side.

Three actors in a room, deciding the shape of the next fifty years, filmed by a writer who has spent his own career deciding how history’s rooms get remembered.

Tags: Wes Anderson, Guy Pearce, production-start, Gary Oldman, Jared Harris, Anthony McCarten

The writer who gave Oldman his Churchill now directs Jared Harris into the Potsdam endgame

More Like This

Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan biopic set to be one of the top-rated films of 2023

The Silence of the Lambs: Jonathan Demme’s thriller looks you in the eye

Tenet: Nolan builds a thriller that runs forward and backward at once

The Thursday Murder Club: Chris Columbus Delivers a Wry, Unfussy Crime Puzzle for Netflix

David Jonsson is weeks from parole when Tom Blyth wrecks his silence in Wasteman

Andrew Scott reads the sky and Brendan Fraser carries the war in Maras’s Pressure

Discussion