Am I completely wiggy, or would Peter Jackson be the best, if not the only, director capable of bringing John Varley’s Gaea books to the screen and doing them justice? The more I think about the care and attention necessary to create the LOTR movies, the more I lust for his version of Varley’s work.
See, I never really thought it would be possible to do Titan, Wizard, and Demon as live action movies, which considering the subject matter pretty much insures they’d never be made into movies at all. Now I’m not so sure, what with the advances in CGI and such, and seeing the mind-blowing sets and critters in LOTR–I’m allowing a ray of hope to shine in.
So, what do y’all think? And I wonder if Peter’s listening…
I’d love to see J. H. Rosny-Aîné’s The Xipehuz, a prehistoric science-fiction tale about a group of alien “shapes” spotted by nomads and all the efforts to stop them from causing the human extinction.
It’s a novelette, but highly recommendable and has a lot of potential to make a strange and frenetic epic. It has battles, weird extraterrestrial beings, lone heroes and wise men.
Now that you mention, Peter Jackson sounds good to direct this story (I thought early in Tim Burton and Gore Verbinski).
I’m not sure about The Hobbit. I really hate that book, as I do all of his books- though it’s more a matter of his tortured prose, not the stories themselves (after all, I like Terry Brooks and David Eddings, and bitter Tolkien fans claim that they rip him off, which to me is tantamount saying all books about vampires rip off Stoker… being the first to use some idea of the magical or supernatural oughtn’t give someone sole domain to the themes, since they’re mostly borrowed from folklore anyway) I like the LOTR movies, however, because there are lots of swords and Orlando Bloom is in them. I know Bloom isn’t in the Hobbit, but is there much fighting in the Hobbit? I’ve only ever gotten far enough into it to know it’s about Frodo’s uncle, and I assume it’s about how he aquired the ring. Don’t worry about spoiling the book for me- I’m not giving it another shot anyway. Ever. I mean it.
Anyway, since he’s proven capable of dealing with epic tales, I wouldn’t cringe in horror if he was the person who finally ends up translating **The Dark Tower ** series into film. I think he could do them in a way that wouldn’t suck
Definitely would rather see Jackson tackle the Hobbit before anything else. And I absolutely loathed Varley’s work, so unless they changed it totally, I wouldn’t be watching a movie based on it.
If ever there was anyone who could bring the first Amber series (Corwin’s Saga) to the big screen and do it justice, I think it would be Peter Jackson.
I would love to see what they would do with Rebma and Patternfall and Corwin’s Pattern walks and shadow shifting and Tir…
His next big project is King Kong. I wonder if he’ll try to do something different after that, a straight-up comedy or drama, so as to avoid being pigeonholed as a special-effects guy.
I wouldn’t kill for him to tackle films based on the Corwin arc of Amber, but I’d help dispose of the body and help with the alibi.
I’d be highly amused and pleased if he collaborated with Raimi to direct Evil Dead IV: Army of Darkness II: Shop Smart, Shop S-Mart! A sort of return to his splatstick roots with much more budget.
But if he’d like to do an epic with more of a tongue-in-cheek vibe, I’d also like to see an adaptation of the old pulp classic of square-jawed chain-smoking dripping-rare-red-meat-eatin’ two-fisted heroes, the Lensman series.
I’d love to see Peter Jackson direct a movie adaptation of Iain M. Banks’ Consider Phlebas or The Player of Games. He’s one of few people I would consider capable of portraying the insanely out-there technological capabilities of the Culture. Hell, Jackson could probably find a way to accurately and vividly portray the Killing Time’s microsecond-long attack on the traitor fleet from Excession…
He’ll do his own thing. But there are some guarantees.
He will do something. He doesn’t like sitting still.
It will be a good story. Definitely one with niche appeal even if it does not have widespread appeal.
It will have lots of good special effects – CGI unless he thinks of something new and cuts new ground.
He will do something no one is really expecting. I mean, Brain Dead, Heavenly Creatures, Frighteners, Lord of the Rings, King Kong is not yor average predictable carreer path.
