A remake of the 1984 David Lynch film Dune has been on the way for a while now. The movie was beginning to take some steps when The Rundown and Hancock director Peter Berg was hired to helm the remake. These steps ended when Berg stepped away after he was offered the opportunity to direct a movie based on the popular Hasbro game, Battleship, which he felt that he simply couldn’t turn down. Now comes word via Entertainment Weekly that Paramount Pictures has found and hired Berg’s replacement for Dune, and his name is Pierre Morel.

Morel is fairly new to the directing game, but he has showed promise so far. He directed the popular Liam Neeson angry father film Taken, and the upcoming John Travolta and Jonathan Rhys Meyers action flick, From Paris With Love. Before starting his career as a director, he also worked as a cinematographer on movies like Jason Statham’s The Transporter and War.

Paramount will now be seeking someone to work on a rewrite of the script by Josh Zetumer (Quantum of Solace). This next step doesn’t appear to be due to a disliking of Zetumer’s script, but more to fine tune everything and calibrate it to Morel’s vision of the film. It sounds like Morel is planning on being very faithful to the 1965 Frank Herbert novel of the same name, which is always a better strategy than basing your remake on an previously existing film adaptation.