9 JG Ballard Stories That Must Be Filmed
Celebrating the life of Britain's late, great author
BY Apr 20th 2009 11:11AMFILED UNDER: Features
User Comments (5)
One of totalfilm.com’s greatest literary heroes, JG Ballard, passed away yesterday.
Some of his dazzling stories have been adapted into films already. Some you’ll know – Empire Of The Sun (1987) and Crash (1996) – some you probably won’t – The Atrocity Exhibition (2000) and Low Flying Aircraft (2002).
But as you might expect from a chap who penned more than 40 million words during a 52-year career, there are many more tales that deserve to be brought into mainstream consciousness, via a stream of Hollywood adaptations.
Here are 9 we’d like to see as soon as possible...
The Drowned World (1962) / The Burning World (1964) / The Crystal World (1966)
The Star: Edward Norton
The Director: Darren Aronofsky
The Pitch: Ballard’s thematically connected first three books (not including his self-disowned The Wind From Nowhere) all concern global apocalypses resulting from environmental disasters.
The Drowned World sees the earth submerged after a bout of solar radiation melts the ice caps, which means that Ballard was warning us about global warming as far back as 1962.
The Burning World finds the planet turned into a desert after industrial waste is irresponsibly dumped, and The Crystal World has our hero, Edward Saunders, discovering a strange material that crystallises all life it encounters.
All three books contain different protagonists, but Aronofsky could connect them via a movie trilogy starring Norton as the lead in each.
The Drowned World in particular is so timely it feels like it contains passages lifted from an environmental blog uploaded last week, rather than a dusty book written 40 years ago, and would make the sort of flick that would force Roland Emmerich to fold away his director’s chair in shame.
Print Comments (5)
1: alowe says
Cocaine Nights, too, please.
First shot: tennis machine pumping out balls.
Pull back slowly to reveal a player in tennis whites, lying dead on the floor in a growing pool of tennis balls.
Posted: Apr 20th 2009 // 1:12PMAlert a moderator
2: MadMatt says
Natali has been struggling to get High-Rise made for years - probably because he wants to make it as bleak and darkly brilliant as you suggest. He's a perfect fit and seriously underrated, so I hope that one at least makes it to the screen.
Posted: Apr 20th 2009 // 6:28PMAlert a moderator
3: chris999 says
By the way, it's Heavenly Creatures - not Heavenly Girls.
Posted: Apr 25th 2009 // 12:00AMAlert a moderator
4: chris999 says
By the way, it's Heavenly Creatures - not Heavenly Girls.
Posted: Apr 25th 2009 // 12:00AMAlert a moderator
5: jargonking says
You're forgetting Hello America, possibly the most cinematic of all his novels featuring a European expedition to explore an America abandoned by it's population more than a century earlier. The opening scene of the ship arriving in an empty New York is phenomenal.
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