Paul Greengrass, the English director of the Academy Award-nominated Captain Phillips, is looking at adapting The Director, an upcoming book by David Ignatius. The pic would be produced by Sony under their Columbia Pictures label. If Greengrass does come on, he’ll be writing the screenplay and in addition to directing the movie.
Beyond Greengrass, The Director may include several other Captain Phillips alums. Scott Rudin and Michael de Luca, both producers on Captain Phillips may come back to help with The Director. In fact, the whole deal is being orchestrated by De Luca who has moved from New Line Cinema (a Warner Bros subsidiary) to Columbia Pictures under Sony Entertainment his first deal as Sony’s newly minted production president. The deal figures to be a further breeze when you consider that Rudin’s production company already has a first-look deal with Sony. All of which is to say that, short of Greengrass deciding he just doesn’t want to do this project from a creative standpoint, this seems pretty close to a lock.
The cyber-thriller novel The Director introduces Graham Weber, the less-than-a-week-old CIA director who just wants to keep operations running smoothly. His hopes are dashed when James Morris, a young Swiss kid walks into the American consulate in Hamburg, tells them that the agency has been hacked, and gives them a list of names of the agents who have been discovered. Weber must team up with the CIA’s resident computer geek, James Morris, to stop this unknown hacker before he takes over all of the CIA through the use of the internet and undercover interception.
The book The Director comes out in June 2014 and will be published by W.W. Norton. No word yet on when the movie might head to production, but it will have to wait until Greengrass finishes the script, and may end up in the queue behind Greengrass’s other projects, including stock thriller The Fear Index and MLK biopic Memphis.
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