I, Robot director swims to Drowning City

Aussie filmmaker Alex Proyas (“I, Robot”) is set to adapt and direct ”Joe Golem and the Drowning City”, based on the graphic novel by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden.

Deadline says the film version of the “supernatural-steampunk” novel would shoot in Proyas’s native Australia.

The book “follows an orphaned teenage girl, an aging magician, a lunatic scientist, a Victorian occult detective, and the stalwart sidekick, Joe Golem—a man whose strange dreams hint of a history he has forgotten–as they struggle for the fate of an alternate 1970s lower Manhattan. In this vision, lower Manhattan sank into the water during a catastrophic earthquake in 1925, leaving those unwilling or unable to abandon it to make a new life in streets turned to canals.”

Proyas was originally set to direct Bradley Cooper in the angels vs. angels flick “Paradise Lost” this year but the film fell apart.