Vincenzo Natali No Longer Directing Neuromancer

There's good and bad news this morning for anyone following the tortuous and slow development of Neuromancer. The good news is that the adaptation of William Gibson's cyberpunk classic is still out there and has just secured some new funding{ =nofollow}. The bad news is that the long-attached Vincenzo Natali (Cube, Splice) is no longer directing. And with him has gone the Gibson-approved screenplay that was supposed to have been cracked.

The UK-based GFM films remain in play on the project, and the company has now partnered with the Chinese C2M Media Group for co-financing and further development. Producer Lucas Foster (Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Man On Fire) is currently in talks with unspecified new writers and a new director.

Published in 1984 (two years after Blade Runner, which, when he saw it, almost caused him to stop writing), William Gibson's book was part of the vanguard of the cyberpunk movement.

The story involves junkie hacker Case, who, as punishment for some ill-advised thievery, has had his nervous system sabotaged by a mycotoxin that prevents him from "jacking in" to cyberspace. He's offered a cure by shady ex-military spook Armitage, provided he participates in a none-more-secret mission against the powerful Tessier-Ashpool family and the sinister A.I. Wintermute. Along the way he encounters post-human icons like the technologically modified assassin Molly and the bodiless consciousness Dixie the Flatline.

Natali first got the film project up and running in 2010. A flurry of activity in 2012 saw Matrix / Transformers producer Lorenzo Di Bonaventura come aboard, and interest from Mark Wahlberg and Liam Neeson in the roles of, respectively, Case and Armitage. But the last update from Natali was in 2013, in which he explained that the screenplay had been the comparatively easy part, but funding remained a sticking point. Di Bonaventura, meanwhile, confirmed to Empire last December that he had left the project behind.

Everything Natali ever said about Neuromancer sounded reassuringly as if the project was creatively in the right hands - but there was no money. Now it seems the money has arrived but the creative team is completely changing.

“William Gibson’s books have been very prescient on the topic of Super Intelligence," says Foster, "which people variously call 'Machine Intelligence' or 'A.I.'. As we surrender more and more of our thinking and imagining... we lose something important and tangible in ourselves. Neuromancer tells the story of that (near) future.”

Let's hope that isn't the behind-the-scenes story of the movie too.