Salman Rushdie to pen sci-fi drama for TV

on Sunday, June 12, 2011
Salman Rushdie to pen sci-fi drama for TV



London: Indian-origin British novelist Salman Rushdie has said that he would pen a science fiction drama for television.

“It's like the best of both worlds. You can work in movie style productions, but have proper control,” Sir Salman told The Observer.

The new work, to be called The Next People is being made for ‘Showtime,' a U.S. cable TV network.

The plot will be based in factual science, but will contain elements of the supernatural or extraterrestrial, said the 63-year-old Booker Prize winner, adding a pilot had been commissioned and written, though filming is yet to begin.

‘Showtime' has announced that the hour-long drama will deal with the fast pace of change in modern life, covering the areas of politics, religion, science, and sexuality.

“It's a sort of paranoid science-fiction series, people disappearing and being replaced by other people. It's not exactly sci-fi, in that there is not an awful lot of science behind it, but there are certainly elements which are not naturalistic,” said Sir Salman.

The idea that Sir Salman, best known for his works Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses, might create a television show came from his U.S. agents, who suggested that he would have more creative influence than with a feature-film script.

He said: “They said to me that what I should really think about is a TV series, because what has happened in America is that the quality — or the writing quality — of movies has gone down the plughole. If you want to make a $300 million special effects movie from a comic book, then fine. But if you want to make a more serious movie. I mean you have no idea how hard it was to raise the money for Midnight's Children.”

Sir Salman said he is also considering doing much of the writing for an ensuing series alone.

“Matthew Weiner on Mad Men writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel,” he said.

The Next People is being made by Working Title, the company behind many of the most successful British Films of the last 20 years from Four Weddings and A Funeral to Mr. Bean, Shaun of the Dead and the Nanny Mcphee films. — PTI

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