The images of the EDL allegedly taking on Muslim fundamentalists on the streets of Britain is also delighting right wing religious organisations in US

The cyberspace element of it would be a completely abstract universe. So it will be the opposite of The Matrix. Except for some very discreet scenes we are not in a world that looks like our own. It’s the opposite. In fact, that’s serves the whole point, that the main character, Case, is what they call a Console Jockey, kind of a hacker, who in a sense, downloads his consciousness into this digital universe, and that’s where he’s happiest. That’s what makes the book so resonate and fascinating and timeless in a sense, in that Case is really enamoured with the immaterial world. He hates what he calls the Meat, his own flesh, his own body, and in the real universe, the last thing he’d want to do is go into a perfect duplicated version of the real world. All he wants to do is escape from our world.

…what makes William Gibson’s book so powerful, is that you feel that this is world that could exist. This is perhaps where we’re headed, and so my approach to it is to not make it too futuristic. In fact the real world is not that dissimilar to ours. We’re only a little bit in the future. It’s amazing to think that that book was written in 1984, because it so accurately imagined what lay ahead for us, and actually that’s why I think now is the time to make the movie, because even ten years ago, I think it would be hard for people to fully grasp the central conceit of it. Now it’s just part of our culture.