Tomorrow morning we’ll see if Paul Greengrass will earn his second Oscar nomination for “Captain Phillips,” but even if he somehow misses out, the filmmaker is keeping an eye toward his next gig. He doesn’t have anything lined up as his next go project — he dropped out of “The Trial Of The Chicago 7” last fall while “Memphis” is still on the backburner — but it looks like he got on with his “Captain Phillips” producer Scott Rudin just fine.
Deadline reports that Greengrass is slated to helm and write “The Director,” with Rudin producing, over at Sony. Based on the forthcoming novel by David Ignatius, the story concerns hacking, the CIA and a search into the darkest corners of the web for a spy. Here’s the Amazon synopsis:
Graham Weber has been director of the CIA for less than a week when a Swiss kid in a dirty T-shirt walks into the American consulate in Hamburg and says the agency has been hacked, and he has a list of agents’ names to prove it. This is the moment a CIA director most dreads.
Weber isn’t sure where to turn until he meets a charismatic (and unstable) young man named James Morris who runs the Internet Operations Center. He’s the CIA’s in-house geek. Weber launches Morris on a mole hunt unlike anything in spy fiction—one that takes the reader into the hacker underground of Europe and America and ends up in a landscape of paranoia and betrayal.
On the one hand, it sounds great. On the other, movies about hackers have a mixed record at best. But on the third hand, if anyone can make his material sing on the screen, it’s probably Greengrass, whose immersive style seems well suited for this material.
Ignatius’ book won’t hit shelves until June, and this movie is just starting to get rolling, so it could be a while yet before it all comes together. But it’s certainly a tantalizing prospect on Greengrass’ plate.