Deus Ex movie looking to District 9, Looper for inspiration

The Deus Ex movie is aiming for a cyberpunk aesthetic, and is looking through the history of sci-fi cinema for inspiration. Director Scott Derrickson and co-writer C. Robert Cargill recently dropped a few movie titles that serve as reference material for their vision of Deus Ex's world.

"We're looking at movies like District 9 and Looper, and Inception," Cargill told Crave (via Eurogamer). "Those are the molds of what we've been doing. Let's push this and do something new with concepts people love, but tell a story that they've never seen before, that just melts their brain."

He says Blade Runner set a "dark, wet, tech-noir" look that was imitated for years, but those more recent films changed the visual style. "The result was everybody loves them. People wanted to see those movies. People are craving new kinds of science fiction that don't look and feel and act like the same science fiction films that they’ve been watching for thirty years."

Derrickson added that due to the game's sheer size and scope, "it's impossible to get the aesthetic of that game into a single movie. So the key is to take some elements of it that are original, and that feel fresh, and that feel like the things that we haven't been looking at for a long time, and use those. What else you need, you invent. You adapt."