Duncan Jones’ Moon is a pretty brilliant film; it’s playing in more cities every weekend and I recommend you heading to this page to see if it’s playing near you. If it is, and if you paid to see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, you should do five viewings of Moon as both penance and therapy. The film just won the Edinburgh Film Festival, and it’s been gathering up fans across the world, all of whom have come to an inescapable conclusion: Duncan Jones is a pretty fucking good director.
Which makes his next project exciting. That project is Mute, a Blade Runner-esque tale set in a near-future Berlin*. We’ve known very little about it beyond the fact that Jones’ script is about human characters first and foremost, with the sci-fi trappings lending the background, not being the point of the movie (this is always the recipe for good science fiction films. Without fail). Now we know a touch more, thanks to Screen Daily:
“Mute is about a woman whose disappearance causes a mystery
for her partner, a mute bartender. When she disappears, he has to go up
against the city’s gangsters.”
That’s a quote from producer Stuart Fenegan. Jones himself tells the site that the new film, which will be a UK-German co-production, will shoot in the historic Studio Babelsberg and will have a budget of about 25 million. To put that in perspective the gorgeous Moon had a 5 million dollar budget.
Mute starts shooting early next year; hopefully we’ll be hearing more from Jones in the weeks and months ahead. I can’t wait to see his casting for this picture.
* it is not and never was going to be Escape from the Deep, a real-life submarine disaster story. Some outlets are reporting Mute as the next film like it’s a surprise; Jones has long said Mute was next, Escape from the Deep doesn’t even have a script right now, and again, Jones keeps saying Mute is next, most recently on his Twitter two weeks ago.