James Cameron and producer Jon Landau have been a bunch of chatty Cathys lately, and not just about the future of the Avatar franchise. Now the director is talking up his adaptation of Yukito Kishiro's awesome sci-fi manga, Battle Angel Alita.
The project has been on Cameron's slate for a long time, but seemed to be dead earlier this year when he stated "I'm in the Avatar business". With the three sequels set to take up minimum the next five years, Cameron considered Battle Angel to be "low priority" on his list of things to do. But according to Landau who spoke to Moviezine about it, the film will indeed happen....
Landau: "We'll focus on 'Avatar' for the next four or five years. Hopefully right after that… I am confident you will see it. It's one of my favorite stories, I think it is an incredible story, a journey of self-discovery of a young woman. It is a movie that begs the question: 'What does it mean to be human? Are you human if you have a heart, are you human if you have a mind, are you human if you have a soul?' And I look forward to bringing that film to audiences."
This actually matches up with what Cameron said back in February of last year when he revealed that they'd be taking elements from the first four of Kishiro's books...
Cameron: "I’m obviously going to be pretty busy for the next five years and so I had to consider, do I hand this project off to another director? And then I thought, ‘No, I love it too much.’”
It’s such a rich world. What I’m going to do is take the spine story and use elements from the first four books. So, the Motorball from books three and four, and parts of the story of one and two will all be in the movie."
If Landau's predictions are correct and they start production in 2016 or 2017, we could see it maybe in 2018? It will probably require some serious special effects and a lot of post-production, as it's set in a distant dystopic future and follows a female cyborg discovered in a trash heap with no recollection of who she is.
