Pre-production
Following the critical and commercial success of his 1966 film A Man for All Seasons, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture and earned Zinnemmann the Best Director Oscar, the filmmaker announced plans to create a film version of André Malraux's Man's Fate (La Condition Humaine), a 1933 novel about the failed 1927 Communist revolution that took place in Shanghai, China, and the existential quandaries facing a group of people whose lives were changed by the event.
"I had an enormous, enormous need to do Man's Fate because that book was a bible to us in my generation," said Zinnemann in a late-life interview. "It was one of the great novels of the '30s and '40s and to be asked to make a film of it was one of the greatest events of my life."
MGM agreed to produce the film. Zinnemann began his career as a feature film director at that studio with the thriller The Seventh Cross (1944).
The screenplay for the film adaptation was created by the Chinese-born novelist Han Suyin, best known for her 1952 book A Many-Splendoured Thing. Zinnemann scouted out locations in Malaysia and Singapore, with interior scenes to be shot at the MGM studios in London, where sets and costumes were created. David Niven, Peter Finch and Liv Ullmann were signed as the stars of the film.
Read more about this topic: Man's Fate (unfinished Film)