James McTeigue, the director of films such as V For Vendetta and Ninja Assassin, has said that he is still actively pursuing an adaptation of Altered Carbon, the Philip K Dick Award winning novel by Richard Morgan.
“I still hope to make [Altered Carbon] with Joel [Silver, producer],” said McTeigue to /Film’s Peter Sciretta. “There is a really good script that I’ve developed for a while, and I’d love to do that when the time is right, and hopefully that time will be shortly. We’ve started actively talking about that again.” Altered Carbon has been a project long in gestation, with the rights bought almost as soon as the novel was published in 2002. It has assumedly been in development hell up until this point, but the news that McTeigue is still considering the project is encouraging, even if there is no specific time frame.
Altered Carbon follows the story of Takeshi Kovacs, a former special forces operative who is released from prison to help solve the murder of a prominent figure on Earth. In the future, a person’s consciousness can be transmitted and downloaded into a different body, meaning that the murder of wealthy individuals is practically pointless, as they’ll simply restore themselves from consciousness backups into clone bodies. Kovacs works the case in a typical hard-boiled detective manner, and uncovers far-reaching consequences in the process.
