After years of trying to make the movie – efforts that were frustrated by the usual industry issues and the slightly more positive fact that he’s recently been busy making Warcraft – director Duncan Jones has some good news to announce about his passion project: Paul Rudd and Alexander Skarsgard are leading the cast of **Mute.
The film, which Jones wrote with Mike Johnson, is set in the Berlin of 40 years from now. Our story finds Skarsgard as Leo Beiler, a mute bartender plying his trade in a city where East meets West in a sort of sci-fi Casablanca. The love of his life – his one reason for sticking around – has vanished, and as he searches deeper into the city’s darker corners, he’ll discover that an unusual pair of American surgeons (one of them Rudd) are the biggest clue to the missing woman’s whereabouts; but our hero doesn’t know whether they’re his best hope or his worst nightmare.
“I’ve been working towards making Mute for 12 years now. I cannot tell you how thrilled I am that we’re finally going to shoot this utterly unique film,” says Jones in a statement picked up by Deadline. “The fact that I get to make it with Alexander Skarsgard and Paul Rudd makes it all the more exciting! Mute is a film that will last. It is unlike any other science fiction being made today.”
And the news just gets better as the man who made Moon is reuniting some previous collaborators for the film, with Sam Rockwell set to appear in some capacity and composer Clint Mansell providing the score. Jones has been scouting locations and the plan is to shoot Mute before Warcraft comes out next year. Talking of the fantasy film, there has been some news on that one, too…