Deadline Hollywood reports some doubleplusgood news—Paul Greengrass is set to direct an adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (also known as 1984, or Pyramid-Eyeball-Bootheel-Oceana Flag for proles raised on Emoji newspeak). The Sony project will reunite Greengrass with writer James Graham, who also worked on Greengrass’ Academy Award-nominated film Captain Phillips.
Back in 2012, Imagine Entertainment was looking to adapt the novel with input from Shephard Fairey and producer Julie Yorn, but that project appears to be dead and the producers exiled to a joycamp, or made into unpersons.
The last movie adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four was released in 1984, starring Richard Burton as Party secret agent O’Brien and John Hurt as Winston Smith, the clerk who refused to get with the program until he was reprogrammed.
Orwell’s dystopian vision may seem unfathomable to today’s audiences, who barely have the capacity to imagine a life under remote surveillance, government-sponsored animosity, mind-numbing entertainment, the end of personal privacy, and endless foreign conflict.