Andrew Niccol To Direct Stephenie Meyer’s Futuristic Love-Story Adult-Novel, ‘The Host’

Man, we were just having an offline discussion of Andrew Niccol, the New Zealand-born writer-director behind the excellent sci-fi film, “Gattaca” (and the not so excellent “Lord Of War”) and what he had been up to. Well apart from a project called “The Cross” in the works for sometime, it looks like he’s already looking towards the next project and has become part of “The Host” — an adaptation of “Twilight” author Stephenie Meyer’s first adult novel. Niccol, who was nominated for an Oscar in 1999 for writing “The Truman Show,” will write the script and direct according to DealMemo.

“The Host” is a futuristic love story (what else) that takes place on an Earth that has been taken over by parasitic alien race that call themselves “The Souls,” (ooooh, scary) and take over human bodies by subsuming the consciousness. Gee, we’ve never heard of that concept much. So it’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” meets Romeo and Juliet or some such?

Here’s what DM says:

One such soul, The Wanderer (so named because she has wandered among so many different worlds) is fused with a dying human named Melanie Stryder, in an attempt to locate the last pocket of surviving humans on Earth. The Wanderer cannot subsume the forceful Melanie, and they battle for the girl’s memories and her spirit.

Sure, whatever. More interesting to us is the project at hand that sounds more dystopian or post-apocalyptic: set in the near future, “The Cross,” starring Orlando Bloom, Vincent Cassell and Olga Kurylenko will likely come first. Though we’re not 100% sure if the film started its Australian production in July as was the case back in February of this year, but it was supposed to shoot this summer (seems like it was delayed for some reason). In that picture, Bloom plays a man seeking to cross a mysterious border that no one has been able to pass, Cassel plays the guard who will go to any lengths to stop him and Kurylenko is the female lead.