Many thanks to @jonspaihts for tweeting the link!
In an interview with Alex Jackson for Nature, Jon Spaights talks about Passengers. In mentioning the film, Mr. Spaihts says the film is in pre-production. While we would all like the film to be in production, we now have the screenwriter indicating the film is not dead.
In the interview he talks about the science in the film and the fact that he designed the space ship before writing the script. The piece includes his diagrams of the ships various decks and he says the following:
“I created these deck plans before writing my script Passengers. The entire movie plays out aboard the starship Excelsior and I needed a detailed understanding of the environment in order to write the story. It helped enormously. I was equally meticulous about working out round-trip travel time and speed-of-light communications lag.
“I took a run at calculating time dilation from travelling at relativistic speeds, but it was too complicated to make it into the script except as a line of dialogue in passing.”
You can read the entire interview here.