Ever since Mars Needs Moms flopped and Disney called off his motion-capture Yellow Submarine remake as a result, Robert Zemeckis has been looking in some seriously strange directions to find his next project. For a moment there it looked like he might be making a movie about garden gnomes, and then he veered back into something a bit more normal sounding, a Denzel Washington-starring drama called Flight. But now, before any of that happens, he may be returning to a subject matter he knows very, very well: time travel.

According to Deadline, the Back to the Future director is in "serious talks" with Warner Bros. to direct Replay, an adaptation of Ken Grimwood's 1987 novel about a man who, after his death, travels back in time repeatedly to inhabit his 18-year-old self. He proceeds to live the next 25 years and always die again, but soon learns that he can make enough changes in his life to prevent the death of his daughter. It's the Groundhog Day-meets-Back to the Future drama you never knew you wanted, but that sounds kinda good all the same.

The script has been bouncing around a lot of different studios for about a decade; most recently it was a Disney project with Ben Affleck in line to direct it. Now with Zemeckis very close to coming on board, he's considering making Replay while he waits for Flight to pull itself together; it seems like a very fast pace for Zemeckis, who has directed only three films-- all of them motion-capture animated-- in the last decade. But now that he seems to be begrudgingly moving on from the creepy mo-cap technology, and going back to making the films about human beings that he used to be pretty good at, he may be speeding things up as well.