Never would I have expected the dad’s-favorite-movie stylings of Robert Zemeckis to collide with the screenwriting major’s-favorite-movie sensibilities of Charlie Kaufman, and especially not when it comes to the world of young adult adaptations. Yet, here we are, TheWrap reporting that such a collaboration is on the verge of falling together, the director — less than a year out from Flight, his successful return to live-action filmmaking — having been in talks regarding Chaos Walking, a prospective trilogy which Lionsgate, back in April of 2012, tasked the Being John Malkovich scribe with bringing to the screen.
The project’s been out of any spotlight since that long-ago announcement, but it’s said that Zemeckis has, himself, been keeping it in mind for several months, scoping out its potential pros, cons, etc. With all this now in motion, could he be in the director’s seat by September’s end? A deal would see the director tackling franchise material for the first time since Back to the Future, though this particular set exchanges some time-travel fun for (surprise!) a dystopian, alien setting.
Here’s an Amazon-provided summary of the first Patrick Ness-penned book, The Knife of Never Letting Go:
“Todd Hewitt lives in a world in which all women are dead, and the thoughts of men and animals are constantly audible as Noise. Graphically represented by a set of scratchy fonts and sentence fragments that run into and over each other, Noise is an oppressive chaos of words, images, and sounds that makes human company exhausting and no thought truly private. The history of these peculiar circumstances unfolds over the course of the novel, but Ness’s basic world-building is so immediately successful that readers, too, will be shocked when Todd and his dog, Manchee, first notice a silence in the Noise. Realizing that he must keep the silence secret from the town leaders, he runs away, and his terrified flight with an army in pursuit makes up the backbone of the plot.”
Therein we can note some early seeds of what may prove a “Kaufman-esque” narrative — his still-unproduced screenplay, Frank or Francis, even used a similar device as “Noise” for a major plot point — though how Zemeckis brings that to life in a sufficient, believable way… well, your guess is as good as mine, and mine isn’t exactly worth a whole lot begin with. But this need not breed pessimism: although Lionsgate are hoping to have another Twilight or Hunger Games on their hands, the latter nearing its own end, I’m optimistic (perhaps naïve) enough to think this would go above and beyond whatever pleasures those two may have previously afforded. Perhaps it’s just nice to see the respective writer and director back at work on a major movie.
Quadrant Pictures and Alli Shearmur are to produce.
Is Chaos Walking a project you’d like for Zemeckis and Kaufman to work on, both separately and together?