Looks like Duncan Jones is making friends in all the right places. With news of his film “Moon” taking home the coveted Michael Powell Award for Best British Feature at the Edinburgh Film Festival, the director is now prepping for “Mute,” a sci-fi thriller whose prospects were previously hinging on the success of “Moon.”
ScreenDaily reports that “Mute,” which Jones compared to “Blade Runner” early on, is now set to film early next year in Berlin as a UK-German co-production and will seemingly jump the queue over “Escape From The Deep,” the adaptation of an Alex Kershaw novel about a malfunctioning WWII navy submarine which Jones is attached to helm and presumably was supposed to be next.
On “Mute,” Jones added that it will follow “a woman whose disappearance causes a mystery for her partner, a mute bartender” who then “has to go up against the city’s gangsters” with the film set to be “definitely be bigger than ‘Moon'” and feature a budget of “something up to $25 million.”
Previously, Jones had noted that the film will predominantly explore the notion of humanity and how it is maintained in sci-fi settings; will feature two villains which he describes as “very unique” and “different to anything you’ve seen”; and that the script had already “started to go out to actors” (Sam Rockwell is said to briefly reprise his “Moon” character in the film as well).
The release of “Moon,” meanwhile, is currently in the midst of expansion around the nation. We saw the film recently and found it to be an admirable, sharp little addition to the modern sci-fi canon despite fanboy’s excessive and overstating praise for it.