Downfall director Oliver Hirschbiegel is heading up The Inquest Of Pilot Pirx – a new film adaptation of a Stanislaw Lem story.
Perhaps best known for his World War II drama Downfall, director Oliver Hirschbiegel is set to make a new sci-fi film based on a short story by Polish author Stanislaw Lem.
First announced last year, The Inquest Of Pilot Pirx is based on Lem’s short story The Inquest, originally published in 1968. Its lengthier title comes from an earlier 1979 Polish adaptation (pictured), also based on the same tale. It tells the story of a routine repair mission to one of Saturn’s rings that has a fascinating additional purpose.
The ship’s crew, led by one Commander Pirx, is a mixture of humans and androids. What follows is essentially a Turing Test in space – if the androids prove to be indistinguishable from humans, then the company that makes them will put them into production. Needless to say, things go awry.
It was announced last year that another noted sci-fi author, Adrian Tchaikovsky, will write this latest adaptation of Lem’s short; Variety now reports that Hirschbiegel and British screenwriter Peter Harness are aboard The Inquest Of Pilot Pirx. The pair recently collaborated on another tense sci-fi story set in space, Constellation, which Harness created and wrote. Hirschbiegel directed three of its eight episodes.
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By the sounds of things, Hirschbiegel and Harness will be taking over from Tchaikovsky somewhat. “I have greatly admired the genius of Stanislaw Lem for many years,” Hirschbiegel said in a statement, adding: “I’m thrilled to be reuniting with the brilliant Peter Harness to develop the screenplay.”
Stanislaw Lem was among the key sci-fi writers of the 20th century. His most widely-known novel is arguably Solaris, memorably adapted by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 and Steven Soderbergh 30 years after that. The tone of those films was understated and cerebral, but Lem’s body of work was varied in style and subject. Pirx the Pilot was a recurring character in several stories by the author, which had a pulp adventure tone even as they asked smart philosophical and moral questions.
Lem passed away in 2006, but his stories remain a constant source of inspiration. Ari Folman’s 2013 animation/live-action hybrid The Congress, based on Lem’s The Futurological Progress was, if anything, slightly too far ahead of its time. Adventure videogame The Invincible, ingeniously adapted the 1964 novel of the same name.
The elevator pitch for The Inquest Of Pilot Pirx could go something like ‘The Traitors in space,’ with a saboteur in the crew’s midst and nobody quite sure who’s human or who can be trusted. Here’s hoping Hirschbiegel and his collaborators can produce a film as strong as that premise.
