The Sword and Laser discussion

http://www.quietearth.us/articles/201...

"Seven Arts Pictures and GFM Films announced today that "Neuromancer," written and directed by Vincenzo Natali and adapted from the William Gibson best-selling novel, has secured sales from distributors in the first three days of Cannes. Territories licensed include: South Korea and Thailand, Taiwan, China, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and India, CIS, Poland, and the Middle East.

"Response to this cult cyberspace thriller has been tremendous and the film ticks a lot of boxes with distributors. The film will be a Canadian-European co-production with principal photography occurring in Canada, Istanbul, Tokyo, and London. Work on the visual effects has already begun, with an anticipated start date in the first quarter of 2012," said Kate Hoffman, Chief Operating Officer of Seven Arts. GFM also reported advanced discussions in Germany, the UK, France, and the USA."

Vincenzo Natali wrote and directed Cube and the underrated (IMO) Splice. What do you guys think about a film adaptation of the book?

It would be nice to see a good adaptation of a Gibson. Johnny Mnemonic was truly awful, I've not seen New Rose Hotel but have heard it was not much better. I guess a lot of it will come down to whether they are actually filming the book or just using the property. It's a bit like with the various films based on Philip K Dick stories; most of them are godawful, and even the good ones tend to be only vaguely connected to the books, the exception being the superb A Scanner Darkly. We can hope, I personally think Gibson's books are eminently filmable, but I guess it's just a case of keeping fingers crossed. Hopefully we're moving away from the 80s and 90s trend of using the source material so badly.

Glad to hear that!

If it stars Will Smith, I'm not going.

and wave after wave of killer robots, that will make it better

Awesome. I wonder if they'll consider doing the whole Sprawl trilogy if Neuromancer does well. Book #2 was always my favorite.

Neuromancer took me a while to get through. There was so much imagery and description. I imagine the book is a great source for a movie though. Just leave out some of the more technical details that are no longer relevant such as if I remember correctly one of the characters was trying to sell "three megabytes of hot RAM" .

Jenny wrote: "Awesome. I wonder if they'll consider doing the whole Sprawl trilogy if Neuromancer does well. Book #2 was always my favorite."

How come you liked count zero better than neuromancer?

I know it is strange, considering that most people don't even realize it is part of a trilogy. According to my review, I was drawn in by the abstract plot and the language. I even read it twice before moving onto the last book!

This is great news if they have the right people to pull off Gibson. I think his style has been difficult to translate to film because they can't get the dialog and character piece right. Here's hoping...

Check out the bbc radio drama version of Neuromancer if you can find it...

Tamahome wrote: "Check out the bbc radio drama version of Neuromancer if you can find it..."

I would like to listen to it but it looks like it is only availble if you go torrenting and some of those are dead, but it is good to know it is out there...

I didn't hate Johnny Mnemonic the way some other folks did. I think it's biggest fault was that it tried to go for recognizable faces in the cast rather than match the character descriptions...

I loved Henry Rollins, though.

I think we may have grown past that need to cast things like this with faces. I hope we've reached the point where it's more about the story than the marketable celebrities...

I'm just saying, if you Google for the right terms, the top link goes to a place that plays it in the page.

I am not sure what to think about this. Neuromancer is one of my favorite books. Its always hard when you hear a book you really think is great is getting made into a movie. There is always that fear that it will really bad and make you want to strangle the people who made it. Or even worse is that it is really good and you have to put up with people who have never read the book telling you things about it.

Thread Necromancy! I just went back & listened to the 1st podcast in the archive. While Johnny Mnemonic had kind of a low budget compared to modern hollywood blockbusters, it had a really high budget compared to any other cyberpunk film made at the time. To really make a fair comparison, watch Circuitry Man.

In Gibson's original short story, the character Jane (played by Dina Meyer--btw, is there an emoticon for lust? Mrowr!) was actually Molly from Neuromancer, but the rights to the character were already licensed, so she had to be changed for the film. In Neuromancer, when Molly mentions her ex-boyfriend in a conversation with Case, I believe she was referring to Johnny.

Oh, & when Gibson talks about Case dealing in hot ram, I believe the value is in the stolen proprietary data stored on the device, not the device itself, kinda like when a credit card company looses a briefcase full of customer account numbers.

Yes,the way the characters switched around in the Johnny film was confusing.

Darren wrote: "Jenny wrote: "Awesome. I wonder if they'll consider doing the whole Sprawl trilogy if Neuromancer does well. Book #2 was always my favorite."

Agreed. Count Zero is the best. Isn't this movie dead..."

Count Zero is my favorite too, high-5.

Also, maybe this would prompt a reprinting of the trilogy. I can only find mass market paperbacks for #2 and #3 and I HATE mass market paperbacks.

This from wikipedia:

In May 2007 reports emerged that a film was in the works, with Joseph Kahn (director of Torque) in line to direct and Milla Jovovich in the lead role.[29] In May 2010 this story was supplanted with news that Vincenzo Natali, director of Cube and Splice, had taken over directing duties and would rewrite the screenplay.[30] In March 2011, with the news that Seven Arts and GFM Films would be merging their distribution operations, it was announced that the joint venture would be purchasing the rights to Neuromancer under Vincenzo Natali's direction at the upcoming Cannes Film Festival.[31] Natali's film went into pre-production in May 2011, and filming is expected to begin in 2012 with a budget of $60 million.[32][33]

IMDb still lists it as "in production" with a tentative US release date of 2014.

If they actually cast Milla Jovovich as Molly, the screenplay can be complete **** & it will still be my favorite film ever!

I think Mona Lisa Overdrive was my favorite, but only by an insignificant margin. Just think of how cool the Judge, the Corpsegrinder & the Witch would look on the big screen!

Here's a more recent update:

http://www.empireonline.com/news/stor...