News broke yesterday that Darren Aronofsky would be adapting Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy for HBO. The mind reels! We caught up with the director last night at the Sundance Institute’s event honoring Glenn Close to ask for more details about his emerging dystopia.
The series is still in its very, very nascent stages, Aronofsky says. “It’s so early — it hasn’t started,” he insists. It is indeed early enough that Aronofksy et al. haven’t even found a writer yet, but the wheels have been turning for a little while. “I’ve known about the books for a few years,” he says. “The last book in the trilogy came out a year ago. Once it came out, we realized how amazing it was, how significant a piece in the sci-fi canon it was.” The books — Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam — are about a massive plague and the warped consequences of bioengineering, plus the religious myth- and world-building that emerges in a post-apocalyptic society. “The chance to work with Margaret Atwood — I love her,” Aronofsky says. “It’s just a huge thrill … She’s one of my favorite writers.” How much involvement will the beloved author have with the TV show? “I hope a lot!” Aronofsky says. “She’s amazing.”
