This Visionary Director Says He Won’t Direct Star Trek 3

By Brent McKnight | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

Star Trek!There’s been a lot of noise about Star Trek 3 lately, most of it revolving around the director’s chair. Roberto Orci, who was going to make his debut at the helm, was ousted for reasons that still aren’t entirely clear, and probably never will be, and there have been a number of names thrown around as possible replacements. One of these directors, who made for an intriguing possibility, Duncan Jones, has now said that he won’t be on board the Enterprise for this voyage.

Jones was included on Paramount Pictures’ shortlist alongside the likes of Rupert Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Morten Tyldum (The Imitation Game), Justin Lin (The Fast & The Furious), and Daniel Espinosa (Safe House). While this may be a collection of filmmakers that the studio is interested in, it doesn’t look like that interest necessarily goes both ways, as Jones took to Twitter to address the rumors.

After bursting on the scene with his esoteric 2009 indie sci-fi feature Moon, Jones, son of rock legend David Bowie, directed the Groundhog’s Day-esque thriller Source Code, and is currently in post-production on Warcraft, a massive adaptation of World of Warcraft. After that, instead of leaping right into another big studio project, it sounds like he wants to do something more personal. What that is remains to be seen, but odds are it probably won’t be nearly the scale of Warcraft, which sounds big. Maybe he’ll return to his independent roots, and it would be cool to see him tackle something in the vein of his first feature again.

Also, apparently what Jones means by his “own thing” is not currently set in stone, however, as he later added:

One of the potential projects Jones has had in the works for years is called Mute. He’s even indicated that it could be next after wrapping up Warcraft. It sounds pretty awesome, and has even drawn comparisons to Blade Runner. A long time ago he said, “There’s a couple of villains in there which I’m really excited about. They’re so different than anything you’ve seen. I hope I get the chance to make the film because they’re going to be very unique, you’re not going to have seen anyone like these two guys before…”

And it definitely falls square into the sci-fi realm, and his description sounds like something worth getting excited about:

No aliens, nothing like that. It’s a very human story, it’s about normal, normal people having to live in this future city. Science fiction is more of a backdrop, in some ways, than you might expect. But I like that, because … if you allow [science fiction] to be in the backdrop and not be what it’s all about, then the humanity is what you’re really concentrating on and looking at. You see why people are the way they are, and how they’ve maintained their humanity in these science-fiction settings. Or the opposite, why their humanity starts to be eroded. When they started to lose their humanity because of the world that they live in, and that’s what this film is going to be about.

As much as I want there to be a solid director in place and for Star Trek 3 to actually be good, Jones has enough of his own unique thing going on that you can’t help but be intrigued to see what he’s going to do next.

As for the continuing adventures of the Enterprise and her crew, one of the possible reasons for Orci’s split with Paramount is that they reportedly wanted him to make it more like Guardians of the Galaxy, whatever that means, and he wasn’t down. Given that Star Trek 3 could begin filming as early as February, we’ll probably hear more about potential directors shortly.