The Freud Scenario

In 1958, John Huston asked Jean-Paul Sartre to write a script for a movie about Sigmund Freud. The Freud Scenario, found among Sartre's papers after his death, is the result. A fluent portrait of a man engaged in a personal and intellectual struggle that was to change the course of twentieth-century thought, the script was too challenging and—at a projected seven hours—too long for a Hollywood audience. The script remains an unrealized classic and a testament to two of the most influential minds in modern history.

Jean-Paul Sartre was a prolific philosopher, novelist, public intellectual, biographer, playwright and founder of the journal Les Temps Modernes. Born in Paris in 1905 and died in 1980, Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964—and turned it down. His books include Nausea, Intimacy, The Flies, No Exit, Sartre’s War Diaries, Critique of Dialectical Reason, and the monumental treatise Being and Nothingness.

Quintin Hoare is the director of the Bosnian Institute and has translated numerous works by Sartre, Antonio Gramsci, and other French authors. He lives in the United Kingdom.