Duncan Jones, son-of-Bowie and director of this year's finest sci-fi Moon, has signed on to direct Source Code: a near-future thriller about a soldier mysteriously waking up in somebody else's body on a commuter train, with a bomb about to go off. That intriguing premise has enticed Jake Gyllenhaal, who's currently in talks to star.
Jones' next project was supposed to be the Blade Runnerish Mute, but difficulties raising the $25m he needs to get it going seem to have put that project on hold for the time being, so a shot at a solid studio genre film would seem like a canny move.
Source Code, to be honest doesn't have the greatest pedigree: the original script was by Ben Ripley, whose CV to date includes little other than two DTV Species sequels. But the currently-hot Billy Ray, who wrestled six hours of the BBC's State of Play into a manageable Hollywood screenplay without making it rubbish, has handed in a rewrite.
Mark Gordon, producer of Speed, Saving Private Ryan, and every Roland Emmerich film since The Patriot, is manipulating things behind the scenes, and shooting is pencilled in for the spring.