http://deadline.com/2015/04/athena-wick ... 201406893/

It's official now!

Athena Wickham, who just exited J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, has officially joined Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy’s Kilter Films to run the company’s television development. At Bad Robot, Wickham served as a producer on Fringe, Person of Interest, as well as the upcoming 11/22/63 for Hulu and Westworld for HBO. She will continue on POI and Westworld, which Bad Robot co-produces with Kilter Films. Additionally, Wickham will join Foundation, Kilter’s drama series in development at HBO. The project, written by Nolan, is an adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s book trilogy.

EDIT: Jonah himself confirmed that he's working on it at the Paley Center event on April 13. FutonCritic lists Lisa Joy as EP as well, but I'm guessing that's cause of her being co-founder of Kilter Films.

http://www.cinemablend.com/television/I ... 68318.html
EDIT (2): Based on my understanding & this article, HBO acquired rights only for the core trilogy. If things were to shape up well, they'd probably pick up the option for the prequels, sequels, and other tie-in properties (The Galactic Empire trilogy, and the Robot series). Unlike GoT, I figured Nolan would intermix all seven in the form of a non-linear narrative (prequels as flashbacks, sequels as flashforwards). In addition to that, because the trilogy by itself is pretty short, he could write additional material on his own to give it a more rhythmic flow. Also expect some characters to be gender-flipped, as there weren't many women in the originals.

http://www.allyngibson.com/?p=29026

For those who've read the books.

Also considered this: Do you suppose some of the concepts Jonah developed for Interstellar, which may have been a bit too complex for the general audience, be reworked & used for this project? Given HBO has the rights for just the trilogy for now, if he needed to include additional material, there's already this old thing to draw material from & explore it in much detail.

So just found out about this and really excited.

Do we have any news on Casting?

So I'd like to throw a few proposals out there and possible roles

Jack O'Connell - R. Daneel Olivaw
Domhnall Gleeson - R. Daneel Olivaw
Tom Hardy - Yugo Amaryl
Stephen Graham
Joseph Gilgun
Michael Shannon - Hari Seldon
John Noble - Hari Seldon / Ebling Mis
Bryan Cranston - Hari Seldon / Ebling Mis
J.K. Simmons - Hari Seldon / Ebling Mis
Jason Isaacs
Emily Blunt -
Saoirse Ronan - Arkady Darell
Kelly Macdonald -
Paz de la Huerta -
Alan Rickman - The Mule
Gary Oldman - The Mule
Ben Kingsley - The Mule
Ralph Fiennes - The Mule

Lennie James
Neil Maskell
James McAvoy
Naomi Watts
Helena Bonham Carter
Gillian Anderson
Terry O'Quinn
Daniel Day-Lewis
Paul Dano

It's still in very early stages of development, as per the reports. No casting has been done. Think it'll be atleast a year or two before they go into principal photography.

ChrisTilford wrote:It's still in very early stages of development, as per the reports. No casting has been done. Think it'll be atleast a year or two before they go into principal photography.

no doubt - and i hope they take their time..

just throwing soem ideas around as some of the casting will make or break the series...
and try to have actors please not good looking people (if they're both I guess its ok, but seriously, lets not have a handsome cast fest like most shows...
play peoples looks down with make up

Akkya wrote:no doubt - and i hope they take their time..

just throwing soem ideas around as some of the casting will make or break the series...
and try to have actors please not good looking people (if they're both I guess its ok, but seriously, lets not have a handsome cast fest like most shows...
play peoples looks down with make up

Going by HBO's track record with casting (as far as I've seen), you have nothing to worry about.

ChrisTilford wrote:

Akkya wrote:no doubt - and i hope they take their time..

just throwing soem ideas around as some of the casting will make or break the series...
and try to have actors please not good looking people (if they're both I guess its ok, but seriously, lets not have a handsome cast fest like most shows...
play peoples looks down with make up

Going by HBO's track record with casting (as far as I've seen), you have nothing to worry about.

yeah im really hopeful for this

Been a year since this was announced. HBO's probably taking their time with developing this cause of creative (Jonah's busy, & they might need to elaborately map out the series to be viable long term since they only have the rights for the trilogy), & financial reasons (Game of Thrones & Westworld're eating a lot of their money right now, though Warner Bros. is co-producing the latter).

The roadmapping may not be much of an issue, as The Leftovers burned through the whole novel in their first season, & have new material for the second.

And if Season 5 is gonna be the last for Person of Interest, think Jonah could re-team with his fellow showrunner Greg Plageman to get this thing rolling. I mean, he's gonna be busy with Westworld for a while, so before they get the greenlight for this project, Greg could fine tune what they intend to explore in this show. The "series bible", if you will. Helps save a lot of time. Read that they're both big fans of Asimov (as are a lot in POI's Writer's Room).

io9 commenter 'Nomadic Dec', suggested this nugget, on the article about Westworld's delay to 2017.

I’m secretly hoping this means that Foundation might be also delayed for a while yet. If I recall correctly, Nolan was only going to focus on the original trilogy, when what should be done is have the prequel plot concurrently run from the second episode onwards so that as the series ends (covering all of the books through to Foundation and Earth), we launch into the beginning of Foundation.

Each book should last roughly 10 episodes:

Foundation:

Psychohistorians: 1 long episode as a premiere
Encyclopedists: 2 episodes (Start with Prelude flashbacks here)
The Mayors: 3 Episodes
The Traders: 2 Episode
The Merchant Princes: 2 Episodes (with gender-flipped Mallow)

Foundation and Empire:

The General: 4 Episodes with gender-flipped Bel Riose
The Mule: 6 episodes

Second Foundation:

Part 1: 4 episodes
Part 2: 6 episodes

And so on for Foundation’s Edge and Foundation and Earth. By using Prelude, and Forward, you could create interesting thematic parallels and circularity that should be appreciate by fans of the series and give greater form overall.

If, or rather when, HBO gets thing going, would love it if Jonah got Hoyte van Hoytema to shoot the pilot, & partially do so with IMAX (given the canvas & visual ambition) for the theatrical screening for the opening piece (as is the case with some HBO shows). They could also have this for the home video release. Hoyte's a real beast when it comes to the format (dude's probably the only guy who can work the camera on his shoulders), so the intimacy aspect of television is well captured, along with the large scale.

And if they choose to take the digital route, go 8K (atleast partially), if it is the a norm for special circumstances in television (Netflix has already gone up to 6K, & they might hit 8 soon). HBO can afford it, & there are already 5 cameras in existence that can pull it off: Astro Design's AH-4800, RED's 8K Weapon Vista Vision, Ikegami's SHK-810 8K UHDTV camera, Hitachi's SK-UHD8060, & the Canon Cinema EOS System 8K camera. Probably be more by other companies, like Arri or Panavision (they just did), by the time the show launches. And there's a rumor that Sony might launch one in the format through their next CineAlta system.

There's even an argument that 8K Digital could even be better than IMAX.

If Jonah's as passionate as Chris about filmstock (given how Westworld's shot on 35mm through Arricams), I think he might employ the same format for this space opera, too.

Looks like the project is dead.

http://deadline.com/2017/06/foundation- ... 202120701/