After years of false starts and rumors, it is looking as if a big screen adaptation of William Gibson’s landmark cyberpunk novel Nueromancer is finally getting under way.
Production Company Seven Arts had gone to Cannes to secure enough in sales from overseas distributors to make it feasible to begin work on the film. Apparently they succeed, as they have announced that preliminary work on the film’s visual effects have begun with principal photography set to start next year and include location work in Canada, Istanbul, Tokyo, and London.
Vincenzo Natali is the most recent director attached to the film. Natali made his debut with the minimalist science-fiction film Cube and is also behind this year’s genetic-splicing thriller Splice.
Although it wasn’t the first cyberpunk piece of literature, Gibson’s Nueromancer is certainly the most noteworthy to come out of the science-fiction sub-genre’s early days. Its combination of hard-boiled detective fiction tropes, dystopian near-future societies and bleeding-edge computer and cyberspace technologies created a heady mixture in readers’ imaginations and influenced such films as The Lawnmower Man, Strange Days and most importantly The Matrix trilogy.
And it is that heavy influence that the book had on the Wachowski’s trilogy that leads me to wonder if the best time for a Neuromancer film has already passed by.
