Alex Billington at First Showing.Net gives the heads up that Neuromancer by William Gibson is maybe set to make the big screen by producer Peter Hoffman and director Joseph Kahn. The faithful are not amused, fearing a recap of the “I demand room service!” Jonny Mnemonic by previous directorial efforts and that Chris Cunningham isn’t on board anymore who seemed to be besides Ridley Scott the only person able to pull it off properly.
Read about it here.
Johnny Mnemonic was a terrible film - I don’t hold high hopes for this one if the same creative team. From that link it sounds that they are going all hollywood on this one - which kinda defeats the purpose of doing this film.
It’s not the same creative team however the director did Torque (3.2/10 and 22% from IMDB/RT) and music videos only (ie, not much). Maybe they can pull it off, however the rights for the movie remake have been swapped around so often we’ll have to see if it gets off the floor first.
Ridley’s too old. Who wants a bladerunner retread? He had his day. Kahn’s perfect for this.
Kahn doesn’t have a particularly good film directing track record at the moment, having a look at Johnny Mnemonic shows a distinct disturbing trend of “make a few music videos, then butcher my first few films” that may head over from Robert Longo to Joseph Kahn (which I hope not).
We’ll have to see how the production goes to get a feel for things, the problem is everyone has a pretty well set preconceived notion of what the book -> film should be like so unless it’s damn good it will get some pretty harsh criticism. As for me - I’d like the denser plot that doesn’t explain stuff (like the book) which I can see not going down well with the people that prefer things to be painfully pointed out to them.
Glad to see someone is staying on top of things.
Hey, Johnny Nmemonic WAS terrible, yes. but if you have read any novels by Gibson, you can see the potential. Neuromancer neds the right staff. I did my diploma on a concept Design on the Novel. I wozld Love to join them to make my tribute to the Story
find my work here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2YG3zMsscw
I consider Neuromancer probably one of the more groundbreaking works in science fiction as it spends most of the time getting on with it rather than getting bogged down in the details. As you say, it needs the right staff who are willing to bring the correct vision to life with an adequate amount of exposition to give a good balance between mind-numbing over-explanation or completely opaque storyline (unless you’ve read the book).