While the world at large is waiting to figure out whether or not Ben Affleck is a murderous bastard in the mystery thriller Gone Girl, the film’s director David Fincher is already mentally preparing for his next project, which isn’t a movie at all. He’ll be heading back to the world of television series for HBO’s dark thriller Utopia, and he revealed that he’ll be directing the entire season, which means we might not be seeing the Oscar-nominated director’s name in the movie rumor mill for the next year or so. (Yeah, right.)
Utopia will be based on the British crime thriller of the same name, from creator Dennis Kelly (Spooks), and it will be reteaming Fincher with Gone Girl novelist and screenwriter Gillian Flynn, who will be writing at least one of the series' scripts. (Or perhaps all of them, now that we know Fincher is in for the long haul.) It will be interesting to see both of these artists take on something longterm like a TV series, especially if it means we can go a year without hearing about Fincher once again refusing to get back with Disney for a 20,000 Leagues film.
Speaking with The Guardian, Fincher shared a few of his thoughts on Utopia.
I like the world of it. I like the characters – I love Dennis’ [Kelly] honesty and affinity for the nerds. I mean, I’ve always been a bit of a junior conspiracy theorist cos I don’t have time to connect them all! But it’s nice to see that somebody has.”
Utopia is centered on the manuscript of a sequel to the prophetic cult graphic novel The Utopia Experiments, which gained notoriety by predicting some of the worst disasters of the 20th century. A small group of people have access to the manuscript and are trying to figure out its secrets in order to stop any new disasters from occurring, but a shadowy organization called The Network is on their heels. Note that it isn’t the Social Network doing the wrongdoing here. Check out a trailer for it below.
Somewhat surprisingly, Fincher doesn’t even have any major projects in the (house of) cards following Utopia’s production stages. He’s reportedly trying to get another HBO series off the ground with novelist James Ellroy, but who knows when that will ever come into existence? For what it’s worth, the filmmaker himself is wryly amused by his own seemingly unpredictable pattern, which has taken him from book adaptation to TV show remake to another book adaptation and now another TV show remake. Maybe this means bestselling authors should start sending their books his way during Utopia's production.
Gone Girl hits theaters this weekend on Friday, October 4. In the meantime, find yourself a region-free player and catch up with Utopia on Blu-ray.
