Ace reporter Ed Douglas from Coming Soon sat down with Ridley Scott this weekend to talk about his upcoming film A Good Year, in which the only things Russell Crowe kills are a couple of bottles of wine. Talk drifted to what Scott’s next project might be after American Gangster, the film Scott is currently shooting in New York City. It turns out that the movie is called Penetration.
No, Scott hasn’t been inspired by Shortbus – it’s based on a book about the Middle East, and the script is being written by William Monahan, the guy who is going to get a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for The Departed.
"The thing I’m doing next will almost certainly be something [based on] a book coming out, which is really about what’s happening now in the Middle East, our complete misunderstanding of what’s going on and how we’re not dealing with it. Inevitably, [it gets] into the heat in terms of a man who is actually a par journalist that gets sucked into working on a peripheral level in a special department where he gets into real trouble in the Middle East. But it’s so accurate. It’s by a journalist called David Ignatius,” says Scott. “Anyone who has spent 30 years in Iran and Iraq and Syria, [who] can speak Arabic, is the man to come up with the right kind of notion, where the idea of maybe you can’t have it tie off neatly because there isn’t a neat ending to what is going on."
Scott also have Ed the scoop on the possible Gladiator prequel – you can check that out (and more) by clicking here.