Writer-Director Andrew Niccol (Gattaca) is in negotiations with new Regency to pick up his new script I'm Mortal.  According to Heat Vision, the film, which Niccol will also direct, "is set in the not-too-distant future where the aging gene has been switched off. To avoid overpopulation, time has become the currency and the way people pay for luxuries and necessities. The rich can live forever, while the rest try to negotiate for their immortality.  The protagonist is a poor young man who comes into a fortune of time, though too late to help his mother from dying. He ends up on the run from a corrupt police force known as "time keepers."  Because time is the commodity, parents in the film can end up looking as young as their children.

Hit the jump for my thoughts on the premise as well a refresher on Niccol's other projects.

I think Niccol has come up with some really thoughtful sci-fi ideas in the past (he also wrote The Truman Show), but I couldn't help but think of two things: 1) this sounds like an idea Karl Pilkington of The Ricky Gervais Show would have; and 2) the South Park episode where Cartman is dying and the doctor says he needs, "His time: he's running out of it--he needs...more time."  But I have faith Niccol can pull it off because I love Gattaca, The Truman Show is a film still referenced because of its concept, and I'm one of the few people who likes Lord of War even though it's not one of his sci-fi movies.

However, I'm Mortal may not be Niccol's next film.  He's also signed on to write and direct an adaptation of Stephanie Meyer's (the author of the Twilight books) upcoming novel The Host, which is about "a not-so-distant future* in which well-meaning alien parasites called "Souls" have arrived on Earth and taken hold of what's left of the human race.

We also reported in February of last year that he was making a movie called The Cross starring Orlando Bloom, Vincent Cassel, and Olga Kurylenko, which also takes place in the near future and is about a man (Bloom) who's trying to cross a mysterious border and another man (Cassel) who's trying to stop him.

*Waiting for the movie that is in the "somewhat distant but not too distant because I don't want to travel that far"-future.