Ridley Scott’s Brave New World

Pass the soma! We’re going to the feelies! Ridley Scott is eager to begin his first sci-fi film in two decades, with a new adaptation of Brave New World starring Leonardo DiCaprio (who owns the rights to the Aldus Huxley’s novel of futuristic dystopia).¬† First heard about this in March, but it seemed too good be true. More oblique hints revealed in an interview in Eclipse magazine yesterday seem to solidify the rumors:

QUESTION: You directed Blade Runner and Alien, which are seminal science fiction films. Why have you not done more science fiction films?

RIDLEY SCOTT: I am going to do one. I waited for a book for 20 years and I have got the book. I am not going to tell you what the book is but that film is going to probably be written within the next month. That will definitely be what I do next after Nottingham, the Robin Hood film that I am doing now in England.

The screenplay is by Andrew Nicholls (not Andrew Niccol of Gattaca fame). For those of you (like me) who dozed off in high school Lit class,

Huxley imagines a future world where children are processed genetically in bottles rather than conceived ‘naturally’, and belong to one of five classes according to their intelligence: from perfect “Alphas” down to moronic “Epsilons”. Learning takes place by repetition teaching during sleep, but basically this consists of enforcing certain behaviour patterns through suggestion. This is backed up by the legal drug ‘soma’ that pacifies people through a false sense of fulfilment.

hmm… Apologies to all those who wish we’d keep political discourse out of movie news. Directors just won’t cooperate.

“You got politics on my movie!”
“No, you got movies in my politics!”

hey, wait a minute! It’s delicious!

You can read the entire novel online. Full of fun stuff like this:

Brave New World takes a look at human obsessions with pleasure. In the society in the book, there are several quick and easy ways of feeling good. First of all, there is soma, a readily available drug used to escape from reality for a few hours or a few days. [as in Prozac, Paxil, or Fox News] The “feelies” are a common form of entertainment. The audience sees, hears, smells, and feels a sort of action-adventure adult movie. [‘Wii Move You’] Casual sex is a third popular way to spend spare time. [Some things never change.]

So what does this mean for fans (those nihilistic fans) of Blood Meridian?

QUESTION: Are you still planning to make Blood Meridian?

RIDLEY SCOTT: We got it down as a screenplay and the problem is that it is so savage. But that’s what it is. If you did it properly it would be an X-certificate. But you can’t apologise for the violence and you can’t quantify the violence and you shouldn’t try to explain the violence. It is what it is‚Ķan exercise in brutality, savagery and violence. For the most part it is probably relatively accurate. It shows the flipside to Dances With Wolves of how the United States was probably taken. It was taken by the throat.

Funny, all these years I thought the flipside to Dances With Wolves was Goodfellas. But I’ll happily accept Blood Meridan as an alternative answer. X-certificate, NC-17, whatever it takes.