I’ve made no bones about it; Alex Proyas is a personal favorite of mine. How can you not appreciate the guy who did “The Crow” (still one of the best comic book movies of all time) and the glorious and criminally underappreciated “Dark City”? Proyas’ latest is the Nicolas Cage sci-fi thriller “Knowing”, and during press junkets for the movie he talked about “The Tripods”, a movie based on a series of young adult books that Proyas hopes to turn into a trilogy.

Proyas tells SciFiWire this:

“We’ve done a draft; we’re basically at the first-draft stage of Tripods, and we’re about to go into our second draft,” Proyas said in an exclusive interview on Monday. “Pretty happy with the script; I think it’s come a long way. … We’re only doing the first book, The White Mountains, and the notion is, obviously, that it will hopefully be a trilogy. But we’ll probably just be shooting the first movie independently.”

“The Tripods” will be based on the first of three Tripods books by John Christopher (the other two installments are called “The City of Gold and Lead” and “The Pool of Fire”), and is set in an anachronistic world ruled by giant three-legged alien machines (think Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds”) that place mind-controlling cranial implants on children when they turn 14 in order to suppress rebellion. The only way to escape the aliens’ enslavement is to flee to the White Mountains. The hero of the books is a 13-year old name Will, who flees the “capping” with his cousin Henry.

Proyas is co-writing the adaptation with Stuart Hazeldine, his co-writer on “Knowing”. The books were previously adapted into cinematic form as a 1984 BBC series.