Despite being one of the classics of 20th Century Literature, Aldous Huxley’s wonderful Brave New World has never had a proper movie adapation (although it has been made for TV a couple of times). That may be about to change with the announcement that Ridley Scott and Leonardo DiCaprio are working on an adaptation of the novel. Rumours that the duo were thinking about making Brave New World have been circulating for over a year, but this is the first official annoucement about the project.
According to The Hollywood Reporter’s RiskyBizBlog, Scott will produce and may well direct, while Dicaprio will also produce and way well star. Scott has apparently wanted to make a film of Brave New World for over 20 years, and has now set it up through Universal and DiCaprio’s Appian Way production company (Appian owns the film rights to the novel). Things are moving forward with Farhad Safinia (Apocalypto) hired to write the script.
Huxley’s book is set in a supposedly utopian future where humans are genetically bred into castes, pharmaceutically anesthetised with Soma and allowed to be sexually promiscuous so they can passively serve the ruling order’s desire for the populace to be obsessed with constant consumption. A character called Bernard becomes infatuated with a woman from a different caste, and suffers persecution when the leaders of the society find his behavior antisocial.
It probably hasn’t become a major film before because the book’s political themes have always been somewhat controversial (particularly its sexual and anti-capitalist aspects), but it should be a good fit for Scott, who has both the commercial sensibility and intelligence to make Brave New World work on screen.