A long-lost screenplay written by iconic filmmaker Stanley Kubrick has been discovered.

The director, famed for his work with films such as The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, Lolita, 2001: A Space Odyssey and more had adapted Stefan Zweig’s 1913 novella Burning Secret into a script.

The script, it’s believed, is close to completion and could still find its way to production. The screenplay, co-written with novelist Calder Willingham in 1956, is made up of over 100 pages and is marked with the stamp of MGM’s script department. Speculation claims that MGM may have cancelled the project when Kubrick breached his contract by signing up to WW1 classic Paths of Glory.

Bangor University film professor Nathan Abrams is the man who found the script. He said: “Kubrick aficionados know he wanted to do it, [but] no one ever thought it was completed. We now have a copy and this proves that he had done a full screenplay.”

“I couldn’t believe it. It’s so exciting. It was believed to have been lost,” he added.

The script is believed to be heavily adapting adultery and, according to Abrams, is “the inverse of [Kubrick’s Nabokov adaptation] Lolita”.

“The child acts as an unwitting go-between for his mother and her would-be lover, making for a disturbing story with sexuality and child abuse churning beneath its surface,” he adding before explaining the script maybe have been too “risqué” for the time before adding: “it’s a full screenplay so could be completed by film-makers today.”

Abrams explained that the script was found his research for book Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film, which will be published next year. Kubrick died six days after screening a final cut of the film.