Doug Liman Now In Talks To Direct The Incredible CHAOS WALKING
If you haven’t read Patrick Ness’ Chaos Walking trilogy, I highly recommend it. While marketed as a YA book, which some of you might unnecessarily scoff at out of hand, Chaos Walking has as much violence, romance, and moral complexity (I can’t emphasize that last one enough) to put it in the running with any other genre novels I’ve come across lately. It’s deep and epic and great.
Which is why I’m so pleased with the direction its adaptation is taking. As you may remember, Charlie Kaufman has been in charge of writing the adaptation, which is no little thing. And now, according to The Hollywood Reporter, Doug Liman may direct.
Liman’s been described pejoratively as a workman director in the past, but while it may hold true that his films lack a particularly specific aesthetic, one could say that the primary fingerprint he adds is an almost across the board entertainment value. He almost always kills it.
So if he does get the Chaos Walking job, I consider the film (or films) in good hands, particularly combined with what I’m sure is an interesting Charlie Kaufman script. The film is hoping to shoot this fall, so we are likely to hear a lot more about it soon.
And for those curious, here is a synopsis for the first Chaos Walking book, The Knife of Never Letting Go:
Todd Hewitt is the only boy in a town of men. Ever since the settlers were infected with the Noise germ, Todd can hear everything the men think, and they hear everything he thinks. Todd is just a month away from becoming a man, but in the midst of the cacophony, he knows that the town is hiding something from him — something so awful Todd is forced to flee with only his dog, whose simple, loyal voice he hears too. With hostile men from the town in pursuit, the two stumble upon a strange and eerily silent creature: a girl. Who is she? Why wasn’t she killed by the germ like all the females on New World? Propelled by Todd’s gritty narration, readers are in for a white-knuckle journey in which a boy on the cusp of manhood must unlearn everything he knows in order to figure out who he truly is.
