In what seems like a collision that's been waiting to happen for some time, the director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is about to meet the author of A Scanner Darkly head on: Michel Gondry is adapting and directing Dick's 1969 novel Ubik.
It's a chance for Gondry to get back to the head-spinning of Eternal Sunshine and The Science of Sleep, following the relative disappointments of Green Hornet and Be Kind Rewind. **Ubik **provides the opportunity to play with all kinds of mad craziness, with its reality-shifting, rug-pulling story of a psychic security organisation hired by a business mogul to protect his assets from telepathic attack, with very bizarre consequences.
It's as good a combination of adaptor and source we can think of, frankly. There's nobody quite like Philip K Dick, the author whose work became Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly and, most recently The Adjustment Bureau. Ubik is widely regarded as his masterpiece, and Dick himself wrote a screenplay in 1974, which playfully messed around with the form of film itself. Let's hope Gondry will at least be visiting that for inspiration.
Steve Golin and Steve Zaillian are producing, with Golin's Anonymous Content staking the film's deveopment until the project finds a studio. Zaillian has a first look deal at Dreamworks though, so we won't be surprised if that's where Ubik finds a home.
We'll bring you more developments as they emerge. In the meantime, The Adjustment Bureau is out on March 4.