Oct 29, 2008 11:32 AM
2,541
Enter your username and password.
San Francisco, 10:14 PM
Tue Feb 9
26 posts in the last 24 hours
Good news for Warren Ellis fans — Hollywood producer David Friendly has taken a shine to Ellis' dark comic Desolation Jones, and hopes to give it the major motion picture treatment. Who doesn't want to see the powder-skinned Michael Jones undergo government testing that turns him into an albino madman who feels no remorse? We caught up with Friendly (My Girl, Little Miss Sunshine) at the premiere of his new movie Soul Men, and got him to talk about why Jones would make an awesome movie. Update: Warren Ellis comments on the possible movie.
At the Soul Men premiere we got Friendly chatting about the next installment of Big Momma's House and the new comedy Don't Send Help about a guy who ends up on on a desert island with six of the most beautiful women in the world, and he doesn't want to be rescued. But our ears perked up when he started talking comics with us.
Q: The big trend in Hollywood right now is science fiction. All of the blockbusters are derived from scifi or comic books, what's your take on that? I know you work with a lot of comedy, will we be seeing any scifi comedy from you?
Friendly: Well, I think you're talking about movies like Transformers and things like that. I think that the audience that goes to movies, they don't just read traditional books and magazines. They read graphic novels and comic books, and they're on the internet. I've got a 13-year-old son who's on Xbox Live. He's playing games with people in Russia, he doesn't even know who he's playing. What you have to do is broaden your horizons. I've started reading graphic novels I never would have started reading before.
Q: Oh yeah what have you been reading?
I read one that I'm interested in pursuing. I don't want to say the name.
Q: Aw come on tell us?
I'll tell you just for fun it's called Desolation Jones. It's a really good comic book. I would love to work on a graphic novel and turn it into a movie, because I've never done that and it's a challenge. And I think what is important is people like me have to stay current with how people are being entertained. If you just rely on books and screenplays, you'll be left in the dust. It's a cool book. It's just something I kind of want to go after.
In order for this to happen I'm assuming that Warren Ellis would have to be a part of it, as I believe he still owns the rights to this slightly abandoned book. Last we heard Desolation Jones was in a publishing limbo. I'd like to see this book get the conclusion it deserves, maybe in a movie?
Desolation Jones is about a former agent of MI6 who undergoes the Desolation Treatment, which entails a year without sleep. He survives and becomes an all white and gray-colored man who kills without remorse. After the project ends, he lives in LA as a private eye who hallucinates all sorts of wacky stuff and works for the people of LA, which turns out to be chock full of imprisoned ex-agents.
Update: We just got comment from the Warren Ellis about the possibility of the Desolation Jones movie. He simply replied:
"All I can tell you is that we've never heard from David Friendly."
Fair enough, but what is this "All I can tell you," is there something to tell? Let's put these two in a room together stat, it could be a fun live action adaptation.
Send an email to Meredith, the author of this post, at meredith@io9.com.
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
Start a new discussion