Doug Liman first set up Luna with Jake Gyllenhaal at DreamWorks in 2007, then with Paramount, then put it on hold for a couple years to direct Jumper and Fair Game. Liman was actively working on a Three Musketeers adaptation before Paul W.S. Anderson beat him to the punch. So he turned his attention to All You Need Is Kill, a spec sci-fi script with plenty of heat behind it. However, All You Need Is Kill has reportedly lost steam, and Liman has returned his focus to Luna (now “Untitled Moon Project”). But Gyllenhaal has since moved on, so Liman is meeting with a bevy of young Hollywood stars to fill the role. Heat Vision indicates the director has already spoken with Rosario Dawson, Megan Fox, Rachel McAdams, Eva Mendes, Zoe Saldana, Olivia Wilde, Andrew Garfield, Emile Hirsch, and Chris Pine, and plans to meet with more names in the coming week.
The story centers on a renegade group of former space employees, led by an Eastern European woman, who travel the world, stealing space equipment in an attempt to go back to the moon to acquire an energy source. The last item to steal — or in this case, kidnap — is an ex-NASA employee.
The script has gone through a series of rewrites over the last several years: Mark Bowden, Ken Nolan, Simon Kinberg, and apparently a few more screenwriters have all taken a crack at it. Liman has expressed his commitment to getting the script right on more than one occasion.
In 2008, he told New York Magazine:
“[The film's] aspirations are loftier. When I wrote it, it was a frivolous movie. Now the planet is in crisis. It’s wrestling with the dominant social issue facing us today, overpopulation.”
Liman is notorious for chaotic productions in a constant state of flux, but he confided in MTV later in 2008:
