Sci-Fi Film and Television Developments

The Tripods

2/24/09 – SCI FI Wire reported that director Alex Proyas’ upcoming film adaptation of John Christopher's young-adult SF series The Tripods will be the first of an envisioned trilogy of films.  "We've done a draft; we're basically at the first-draft stage of Tripods, and we're about to go into our second draft," Proyas said. "Pretty happy with the script; I think it's come a long way. ... We're only doing the first book, The White Mountains, and the notion is, obviously, that it will hopefully be a trilogy. But we'll probably just be shooting the first movie independently."  The film is based on the first of three Tripods books by Christopher, the pseudonym of Samuel Youd (the other two are The City of Gold and Lead and The Pool of Fire), about a post-apocalyptic world ruled by giant three-legged alien machines who place a mind-controlling "cap" on children when they near the age of 14. Proyas is co-writing the adaptation with Stuart Hazeldine.  "That's something that I read when I was exactly the right age, which was about 11 or 12," Proyas said.  "It's virtually a coming-of-age story with alien invaders. So that really struck a nerve with me as a kid, and it's haunted me: the notion of these creatures sort of capping us and putting these kind of mind-control probes on us to kind of indoctrinate us into the world of adults. I always found that a really powerful notion, so that's always been something that I've wanted to explore in those stories."

1/29/09 - Director Alex Proyas (Dark City) told ComingSoon.net that he's still developing a movie based on John Christopher's The Tripods, as well as a prequel Dracula film.  "I'm working on a bunch of different things, and the two projects I'm excited about are an adaptation of John Christopher's The Tripod stories that I've co-written with Stuart Hazeldine, who is one of our writers on Knowing, and the Dracula project," the Australian filmmaker said. "Both are very exciting projects, but at this stage we're still in the budgeting process for both, so I can't really tell you much more than that."  Proyas added that he was intrigued by the Dracula script, Dracula Year Zero. "The reason I got excited about the project is I read a particular script that puts the whole legend on its head in every conceivable way and comes out with something that is both a kind of an ode to Bram Stoker's original Dracula, in that it's kind of a prequel to that, but it also redefines the character to such an extent that I found it quite exciting, so that is very much a kind of reinvention of that character, and it's why I got excited about it," he said.

AlienAlmanac.com 2009