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Chuck Palahniuk's Survivor Being Adapted by Francis Lawrence

by Alex Billington
December 3, 2007
Source: Collider, SlashFilm

First Francis Lawrence (above, right) adapted the Vertigo comic Hellblazer into Constantine, then he adapted Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, and now he's working on adapting Chuck Palahniuk's novel Survivor. And speaking of Chuck Palahniuk's (above, left) books, you already all know Fight Club and it was just announced that Choke is debuting at Sundance in January. Combine the two, Francis Lawrence and Chuck Palahniuk, and you've got what could be another Fight Club-like cult classic in the works.

The book is about a religious extremist who hijacks an airplane with plans to crash it and he tells his life story into the plane's black box. An adaptation has been in the works for years, but when September 11th happened it was shelved for obvious reasons. Now years later in a recent interview at Collider while promoting I Am Legend, Francis Lawrence has brought it back up.

"I'm working on a book 'Survivor' by Chuck Palahniuk that I'm working on with a friend. It's a great book. I love that book. So we've been working on that."

Here is the Amazon.com description of Survivor: "Some say that the apocalypse swiftly approacheth, but that simply ain't so according to Chuck Palahniuk. Oh no. It's already here, living in the head of the guy who just crossed the street in front of you, or maybe even closer than that. We saw these possibilities get played out in the author's bloodsporting-anarchist-yuppie shocker of a first novel, Fight Club. Now, in Survivor, his second and newest, the concern is more for the origin of the malaise. Starting at chapter 47 and screaming toward ground zero, Palahniuk hurls the reader back to the beginning in a breathless search for where it all went wrong. This time out, the author's protagonist is self-made, self-ruined mogul-messiah Tender Branson, the sole passenger of a jet moments away from slamming first into the Australian outback and then into oblivion. All that will be left, Branson assures us with a tone bordering on relief, is his life story, from its Amish-on-acid cult beginnings to its televangelist-huckster end. All of this courtesy of the plane's flight recorder."

Peter Sciretta over at SlashFilm, who first discovered the news, claims that Survivor is an even better novel than Fight Club and could be a great movie if it gets made. The problem is whether or not a studio has actually greenlit it or if Lawrence is just working on getting a story and script together before pitching it again. No matter the case, I'll hop on the bandwagon and support this movie, as the concept and story sound great all tied together with a director who just proved himself again with I Am Legend.

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