Back in January, the seeds of doubt surrounding Duncan Jones‘ ambitious sci-fi flick "Mute" began to sprout into something more. In an interview he noted that reception to his movie was pretty cool and it was proving hard to get off the ground.
"Well it’s in a bit of a limbo actually. I’ve always loved the script and felt it was a film worth making, but it’s a tricky one. It’s a sci-fi film, and one of the drafts of the scripts got leaked a while back. The reaction was mixed. Most people didn’t get the fact that yes it is sci-fi but it’s a futurist film. It’s a thriller that happens to take place in the future, it’s not some amazing piece of technology that ya know the world is depending upon and the whole story revolves around some particular piece of technology or some sci-fi hook," Jones said adding, "I just need to get away from it for a while. I’ll come back to it one day and hopefully it’ll work the way I see it working."
Well, he has come back to it. In a way. Speaking with Gordon And The Whale, Jones revealed that the film is coming, albeit in a different format than we expected.
"Although, I can sort of tell you that I’ve been talking to my producer today and we have decided that we’re going to release ‘Mute’ as a graphic novel," Jones said. "Because we’ve had so many problems trying to get this film made, you know? The people who are involved with financing films have just been…shy…shy of making the script. So what we decided to do is we’re going to make a graphic novel of it, prove it…prove it to an audience that this works and maybe in the future get the chance to come back and make it."
While it’s definitely a bit of a bummer — "Mute" has been a project Jones has been developing and talking about for years — he’s not the first filmmaker to take an ambitious, hard to fund project to the page instead of the screen. Recently, Darren Aronofsky took his long gestating adaptation of "Noah’s Ark" the graphic novel route as well. It’s certainly a good way to these stories out there in some fashion and in both cases, we hope that it helps to get these pictures mounted somewhere down the line.
As for Jones though, he’s not going to nurse the bruise of "Mute" not getting made for too long. He’s already hinting at this next project, telling GATW, "I will say this; you know what a big fan I am of ‘Blade Runner‘…but there’s all this news on the Internet lately about the rights to ‘Blade Runner’ being bought up…I’m interested in doing a city-based science fiction film. And this [new project] is going to do all the geeky things I would want [from one of those kinds of films]." Sounds great.
Jones’ latest effort "Source Code" will unspool in Austin at SXSW later today. Keep an eye out for our review.
