As Gone Girl racks up tremendous accolades, director David Fincher’s follow-up project will not be for the big screen but rather the small as he reunites with writer Gillian Flynn for the HBO series “Utopia.” According to The Guardian, Gone Girl writer Flynn will adapt the British crime thriller, and unlike Fincher’s previous series “House of Cards,” the helmer will direct all episodes in the first season.
Created by Dennis Kelly for Channel 4 in 2013, the original “Utopia” revolved around a graphic novel called “The Utopia Experiments” that proved oddly prophetic in predicting world disasters. When a group of young people/conspiracy geeks come across the manuscript for the sequel novel, they are pursued by an agency called The Network while trying to stop the future calamities it documents.
“I like the world of it,” Fincher says of the show, which will occupy him well into 2015. “I like the characters I love Denniss [Kelly, creator of the UK show] honesty and affinity for the nerds. I mean, I’ve always been a bit of a junior conspiracy theorist ’cause I don’t have time to connect them all! But it’s nice to see that somebody has.”
The UK version of “Utopia” just finished its second season in August and is eyeing a potential third and fourth, which if you know anything about British television is kind of a long run. Fincher himself admits to be following a similar pattern to a few years ago when he adapted The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for the screen then followed it with the popular Netflix series “House of Cards.”
“Oddly enough,” he says, “I did a remake of a literary adaptation, then I did a remake of a television show. Now I’m doing a literary adaptation [and then remaking another show]. I don’t know: the pattern is not clear to me exactly what it is that I’m doing. But I’m sure it’ll be illuminated for me. Your job is context. I’m just a hamster on a wheel!”
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