Ever since he came to Danny Boyle’s attention by writing the source material for the filmmaker’s “The Beach,” novelist-turned-screenwriter Alex Garland has been carving out a neat little niche for himself as the writer of some unusually thoughtful science fiction projects. From his collaborations with Boyle on “28 Days Later” and “Sunshine” to the recently-released “Never Let Me Go,” Garland’s lent a fresh take to familiar tropes, even if in the first two cases he wasn’t able to escape the trappings of the genre, and the films tended to fall apart in the final act.
He’s got comic book adaptation “Dredd,” with Karl Urban and Olivia Thirlby, shooting imminently, and Garland talked to Worst Previews in support of Mark Romanek’s film, and gave some updates on a trio of projects that he’s been linked to. While we reported on his skepticism regarding a possible third film in the “28 Days Later” series yesterday, he’s slightly more positive on the remake of “Logan’s Run,” which he was reported to be circling earlier in the year.
Garland relates “I’ve been talking to a guy called Carl Rinsch and Warner Bros about making it into a film. I have a slightly uneasy feeling [about] that because I’m now the go-to screenwriter for people who have short lives.” Rinsch is the commercials director who was briefly in the director’s chair for the “Alien” prequels, before being replaced by his mentor (and father-in-law) Ridley Scott. It’s not all bad for Rinsch though — his short film “The Gift” made waves earlier this year, and he’s gearing up to shoot “47 Ronin” with Keanu Reeves in the near future.
It sounds like things aren’t much further along on “Logan’s Run” than they were in July — partly because both Garland and Rinsch have more pressing concerns, we imagine — but it seems likely that the project will move forward down the line.
Garland was also the first writer on board the adaptation of the video game “Halo,” but despite recent movement on that, and reports that Garland’s script, along with three others, were being used as a blueprint, the writer no longer seems to be involved: “I wrote a screenplay for that a long, long time ago. I have no idea what’s happening. I was contracted to write one draft of the screenplay. That was it. [That was] eight years ago.” So if it does happen, it seems that Garland’s involvement will be minimal — particularly with Dreamworks allegedly using spin-off novels as source material for their version to avoid legal issues with earlier scripts based on the game.