There’s a new director attached to the long-in-development-hell adaptation of William Gibson’s groundbreaking and archetypal cyberpunk novel Neuromancer. The most recent director in line for the project was Joseph Kahn of Torque infamy, so news of any change is pretty much good news. (The concept poster seen above was made by the production company for when Kahn was attached.) THR reveals that the new director is Vincenzo Natali, of Cube and the soon-to-be-released Splice, so the movie actually has some potential now. Of course, adapting the novel is a mighty challenge with all of the abstract imagery involved and the inevitable reliance on CGI, not to mention the complicated nature of the plot. The cyberspace scenes from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex are actually a pretty accurate depiction of the cyberspace scenes Gibson created here. Plus, given that the project is set up with some smaller Canadian companies, who knows if this will ever move forward.
Natali is also writing the script, according to this Astral Media press release.
Here’s a little blurb about the novel’s story:
Case was the hottest computer cowboy cruising the information superhighway–jacking his consciousness into cyberspace, soaring through tactile lattices of data and logic, rustling encoded secrets for anyone with the money to buy his skills. Then he double-crossed the wrong people, who caught up with him in a big way–and burned the talent out of his brain, micron by micron. Banished from cyberspace, trapped in the meat of his physical body, Case courted death in the high-tech underworld. Until a shadowy conspiracy offered him a second chance–and a cure–for a price…
