Michel Gondry To Direct ‘Ubik’

Michel Gondry, director of The Green Hornet, is developing an adaptation of the Philip K. Dick sci-fi novel Ubik.

Gondry is on board with Steven Zaillian’s Film Rites company, but the project has not been picked up by a studio yet.

Ubik was named by one of the 100 greatest English-language novels published since 1923 by Time magazine.

Below is a plot synopsis from the official Phillip K. Dick website:

Glen Runciter is dead. Or is everybody else? Someone died in an explosion orchestrated by Runciter’s business competitors. And, indeed, it’s the kingly Runciter whose funeral is scheduled in Des Moines. But in the meantime, his mourning employees are receiving bewildering — and sometimes scatological — messages from their boss. And the world around them is warping in ways that suggest that their own time is running out. Or already has. Philip K. Dick’s searing metaphysical comedy of death and salvation (the latter available in a convenient aerosol spray) is tour de force of paranoiac menace and unfettered slapstick, in which the departed give business advice, shop for their next incarnation, and run the continual risk of dying yet again.