"It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea." So began Philip Reeve’s acclaimed young adult series Mortal Engines: a dystopic science-fiction where moving cities hunt each other across a blasted, post-nuclear Earth.

The bestselling book is now being adapted for film by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, with visual effects specialist Christian Rivers directing the project and Jackson serving as co-writer and producer. Filming wrapped up last month in New Zealand and is currently in post-production, with a slated release of December 2018.

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"I would hope that if you like sweeping adventure and huge science fiction worlds this will deliver for you", says Reeve. "Plus it’s something new – it’s not a superhero movie or a remake or part of some franchise that’s been running for 30 years, which is quite rare in films these days."

Describing himself as writer "for the young and young at heart", Reeve has been penning children’s books and science fiction stories since the early 1990s, when he worked as an illustrator in Brighton. Now 51, he spends his days writing from his home in Dartmoor, where he lives with his wife, son, poodle and two alpacas.

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Mortal Engines was his first feature-length novel, winning the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize and spawning three sequels. It followed the journey of Tom Natsworthy, a lowly museum curator in the city of London, and the murderous Hester Shaw, a hideously scarred survivor from the wastelands.

"The book started out as your standard post-apocalyptic thing," Reeve recalls, "but with a sort of odd retro-futuristic and rather English flavour. I think it was supposed to be like a very English action movie."


Philip Reeve, author of Mortal Engines David Levenson / Getty Images

Aptly enough for a story being handled by the makers of Lord of the Rings, Philip cites Tolkien as one of his major inspirations, though the full number of influences are many and varied. Golden Age science fiction writers such as Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke found their way in there, as did films such as Mad Max and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

It was only when Reeve hit upon the idea for moving cities, however, that the book really came together. "There was need for some kind of big thing or distinctive image at the centre of it, and a moving city was the biggest thing I could think of! The only reason I could think you’d want a city to move would be that it could chase and catch smaller cities to tear them apart and make itself stronger, so that was where that concept came from."

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The book didn’t shy away from the underlying brutality of this conceit. Behind the whimsy, the world of Mortal Engines is every bit as cruel and unfair as our own. The Traction Cities are governed by an uber-rich elite, with new London structured in tiers "like the layers of a wedding cake, the lower levels wreathed in engine smoke, the villas of the rich gleaming white on the higher decks". Today, Reeve backs away from the social commentary: "I guess it's in there if you want." But the radical critique could lend the film an extra contemporary edge.

Originally published in 2001, the film rights to Mortal Engines quickly started circulating the desks of Hollywood executives. Jackson eventually brought the option outright, though it would be over a decade after the book’s debut before the movie progressed any further. Then a year and a half ago Reeve received an email from the New Zealand director, announcing that production was underway.

“I was suspicious at first actually!” he says. “Rumours about the project had slipped out a few years ago and from time to time people would pop up on Twitter asking me about whether Peter was adapting my book. Of course all I could say was ‘Oh I don’t suppose so’ and ‘you mustn’t believe everything you read on the internet haha’. So when the email came through it occurred to me that maybe this wasn’t Peter at all but someone fishing for information."

The message was genuine and in May Reeve got the chance to watch some of the shoot in Wellington. The experience seemed unreal at times. "You’d see all these people going about creating these incredibly detailed sets and acting out something I’d made up in my head years ago. There was a scene I saw with a character called Anna Fang [played by South Korea-born singer Jihae]. She had this long red trench coat and jet black hair and was sitting in this rusty aviators bar; because everything else had all these muted earth tones the contrast made her really stand out. It was pretty much exactly how I’d originally pictured it, so when I saw it I thought, 'That’s me! I did that!’"


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Like the novel, the film proudly wears its steampunk vibe on its sleeve. “Visually speaking the film as whole has an emphasis on rust and mud and huge industrial machinery clanking away, but I think the tone is a fairly upbeat, fast-moving adventure; there’s going to be a lot of big action sequences and set pieces."

What’s it like waiting for the movie to drop? "It’s exciting – not kind of leaping around saying hallelujah exciting, but exciting and worrying at the same time. I’ve been happily turning out my books for 15-odd years now and keeping myself and apparently enough other people entertained to make a living out of it. Of course with this huge movie a lot more people are hopefully going to know about Mortal Engines… so things are definitely going to change."