Given the early success he had with socially conscious sci-fi such as Gattaca and writing **The Truman Show **earlier in his career, it’s no surprise to see that Andrew Niccol is still coming up with twisty SF projects. He has another script ready to go in I’m Mortal.
New Regency is angling to pick up the script, which is set in the near future, albeit one where the aging gene has been handily switched off.
But there’s a catch – time has become the new currency, and to avoid overpopulation, it’s used as a way to stop everyone living forever. If you’re rich in the stuff, you’re immortal, but if not? It’s time to meet your maker.
Our hero is a poor lad who suddenly comes into a fortune of time, but too late to help his dying mother. And then there’s a corrupt police force known as the time keepers on his trail… If all goes well, Niccol will shoot the film in the summer, once he’s gathered a cast.
The seemingly swift progress on this leads us to wonder what has happened to the other big projects he was involved with, such as **The Cross **and The Host. The Cross, with Orlando Bloom and Vincent Cassel, is supposedly about a man (Bloom) trying to get past a mysterious border. While it grabbed cast members left and right (John Goodman and Olga Kurylenko also signed on), it never seemed to actually end up shooting and the IMDB lists it as “cancelled”. Guess we’ll have to wait on that one.
And alien symbiote drama The Host? Though Niccol was apparently given the Stephenie Meyer stamp of approval (since the Twilight writer penned the novel), very little has been heard about that either. Perhaps it’ll wait until after I’m Mortal, though given studios’ eagerness to push ahead with anything Meyer-flavoured given the sparkly vamp crowd’s success, it seems odd.