DARK CITY Director Alex Proyas Is Developing a TV Series Set in That Universe!
I sure do love director Alex Proyas’ 1998 neo-noir sci-fi movie Dark City. I remember being completely blown away by that film when I first watched it. It was unlike anything that I had seen before! Well, the filmmaker is jumping back into that world with a series adaptation that he’s developing!
Proyas recently appeared virtually at the Popcorn Frights Film Festival to debut a new short film that he made titled Mask of the Evil Apparition and that short is set within the Dark City universe. It was at this time that the filmmaker revealed that he is developing a series:
"Dark City right now is really an intriguing one to me because we’re developing a series, a Dark City series, which we’re in the very early stages [of] but I’m having to reanalyze in order to construct a new story. I’m having to go back and kind of jog my memory as to what we actually did and what I think worked and what I think didn’t work and reevaluate my own film, so that’s been a very interesting experience as well which I’ve not done before.”
That’s pretty damn exciting! I hope that he actually gets to produce this thing because I’d love to see what he’s planning for it. As for the short film, it’s 20 minutes long, and this is the synopsis:
“A young woman with no memory searches a deserted nocturnal city looking for something or someone. Only problem is she can’t remember who or what. She encounters twin brothers who may be her salvation, but one of them warns her that the ‘Mysterious Ones,’ a nefarious group of clones, are after her. Another woman in disguise also offers to help, but can she be trusted?” The brand new short is being described as “a film about identity by visionary filmmaker Alex Proyas, made entirely with virtual production, and from the Dark City (1998) cinematic universe originally created by Proyas.”
I included a poster and an image from that short film below. Proyas went on to talk about the Director’s Cut of Dark City, which was released in 2008. That version of the film allowed him to go back realize the original vision that he had for the movie the best he could:
“You know, it tested very poorly and I was forced to do certain things I didn’t agree with and we made good to a certain extent in the director’s cut. Because you couldn’t completely resalvage it. I mean the whole point of a director’s cut is the illusion that we resalvage what we’ve done originally. But you can never do that. Often it’s just impossible. In those days we shot on neg and the negs being cut. And its been cut in a certain way and it’s very, very hard to go right back to what you originally designed. So you do like a hodgepodge version of it. Certainly it’s closer to my original conception than the theatrical cut was, but it is still not exactly what my original conception was. You would have to go right back to dailies to do something like that.”
The original film followed the character John Murdoch, “a man who struggles with memories of his past, which include a wife he cannot remember and a nightmarish world no one else ever seems to wake up from.”
Here is the poster and image from Mask of the Evil Apparition.
Source: Bloody Disgusting