Of all the films being shopped at this year’s American Film Market, the one I have to say I’m excited to know more about is the one I found out about from Twitter.
For it was Moon director Duncan Jones himself who forwarded to his Twitter list the link to the blog article written by an associate of his, that sourced ScreenDaily.com‘s article reporting the news. With that kind of pedigree, you know the news has to be good.
Anyway, the movie in question is called Source Code, and the news is that Jones will be directing it, with Jake Gyllenhaal playing the lead role. The film, which will start filming early next year, will be distributed in the U.S. by Summit Entertainment for Vendome Pictures and the Mark Gordon Co. after having been at Universal Pictures with Topher Grace as the lead and Shane Abbess as the director in 2007 (according to Variety).
/Film.com has some possibly spoilery comments on the plot, based on a first version of the script that writer Brendon Connelly read:
In the first scene, a man named Colter—Gyllenhaal’s character—wakes up on a train headed through the New Jersey countryside. He has no idea how he got there and nobody he speaks to can offer him any clues, though he is told that, to his surprise, he has taken this train every day for the last three months.
After some interaction with the various characters in his train car, many of whom become more important as the story unfolds (particularly Christina… but I won’t say why, and mention her in part to just raise the question of who the female lead might be), Colter heads to the bathroom where, quite surprisingly, he finds a bomb. Unfortunately, just after Colter finds it, a cell-phone detonator is triggered and…
…he’s killed. In fact, the entire train explodes. There’s a big ball of fire and, for just eight frames of film, some other cryptic goings on that only make sense later. We’re now seven or eight minutes in and about to be shocked.
…Colter awakens again, this time in an Isolation Unit where he’s being debriefed by a man named Goodwin, perhaps symbolically so. It seems that Captain Colter Stevens has just been living through a virtual simulation of the incident on the train in order to discover who it was that bombed it.
As for his previously announced plans, Jones himself had this to say , also via his Twitter feed:
For those asking, Mute [is] still in the plans, just slightly delayed. It’s a hard sell…whereas Source Code came with an offer hard to refuse.
If “offer” means “money” like I think it might, I don’t think I’d mind waiting for Mute so that Jones can raise the funds and increase his bankability as a director in studio execs’ eyes.
Because that’s just the price you pay when you have such a strong debut as an indie filmmaker.
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