A regular BD tipster had been telling us the following news for the past few weeks, but we couldn’t get any sort of official confirmation. After years of discussion, Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor says HBO and BBC Worldwide Productions are (finally) moving forward with the development of “Year Zero,” the grim pre/post-apocalyptic sci-fi epic that Reznor has chronicled in his music as well as in a celebrated Alternate Reality Game (ARG), the LA Times confirms. Details inside.
“We are in [the development phase of] pre-production with HBO and BBC [Worldwide Productions] to do a miniseries,” Reznor said Monday. “It’s exciting. I probably shouldn’t say too much about it except that I understand that there’s a thousand hurdles before anything shows up in your TV listing. It’s been an interesting and very educational process and it cleared the HBO hurdle a few months ago and now we’re writing drafts back and forth. So it’s very much alive and incubating at the moment.”

Reznor is working with the team of Lawrence Bender, best known for producing Quentin Tarantino films such as “Pulp Fiction,” “Inglourious Basterds” and “Reservoir Dogs” as well as the documentaries “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Countdown to Zero,” and Kevin Kelly Brown, who was executive producer on “Roswell.”

“BBC [Worldwide Productions] was the first to show interest and came on as the studio,” Reznor explained. “Our writer is Daniel Knauf from ‘Carnivàle’ and he’s busy with pages right now and revising the overall world Bible. It’s been an interesting collaborative effort but I’ve learned that [television development] moves at a glacial pace.”

“Year Zero” began (as so many things do in the music of Nine Inch Nails) from a place of wrenching emotion and sonic adventure. Reznor found himself increasingly outraged by the geopolitical situation during the Bush years and he wanted to express the fury in music, but he found himself bored by traditional approaches to protest music.