David Cronenberg was rumoured for a while to be behind Timecrimes, until he categorically told the world that he isn't. And now it turns out that screenwriter Steve Zaillian is eyeing Timecrimes for himself, for one of his occasional forays away from his word-processor and behind the camera.
The film is an English-language remake of the Spanish Los Cronoscrimenes, which involves a hapless man named Hector getting into paradoxical hot water via a time machine in a laboratory near his home. Think Back To The Future 2, Triangle, and Primer, and you're on the right lines.
"We have to cast it, but it's a tricky one," says Zaillian, who is yet to one-hundred-percent commit himself to the project. "I'd want to make it really low budget. I think part of its appeal is that it's kind of a low budget thriller, but it's hard to get that made without a major actor. I'd like to make it for $10m so the trick is to find the right actor that doesn't suddenly push the budget up into to $20m or $30m. It's one of the rare opportunities where you have four characters, two locations; why do you need to spend that much money? This is a story that you wouldn't want to tell any differently, and it happens to be an economical way to go."
Elsewhere in the same Coming Soon interview, Zaillian gives a brief update on A Thousand Splended Suns, the mooted adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's novel. Rather than taking his Girl With The Dragon Tattoo approach, "where I had no qualms about setting it in Sweden but the people would be speaking in English", Zaillian wants Suns to be an entirely Middle Eastern affair.
"I think it would be more distinctive if it was made indigenously," he says. "I want this to be done by a Middle Eastern director with Middle Eastern actors, maybe even in Farsi. That's a tough approach to get the money for, but that's what we're trying to do."
A Thousand Splendid Suns currently has a made-up date of 2015 on the IMDb, which basically means that nobody yet knows when it'll be underway. Likewise Timecrimes, will get going at an unspecified point in the future. And three weeks ago. And tomorrow.