Andor Creator Tony Gilroy Shares New Details About His Next, Non-Star Wars Movie [Exclusive]

After making his feature scripting debut with 1992's "The Cutting Edge," an agreeable figure skating riff on Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew" starring D.B. Sweeney and Moira Kelly, Tony Gilroy quickly established himself as a Hollywood screenwriter to watch. Though he received only scattered praise for delivering a hugely engrossing adaptation of Stephen King's "Dolores Claiborne" and penning the niftily plotted medical thriller "Extreme Measures," his major rewrite of "The Devil's Advocate," which transformed a difficult-to-pin-down project into a shamelessly entertaining box office hit, placed him on the town's A-list.

While Gilroy didn't have a singular voice like his top-paid peers Shane Black, Joe Eszterhas, and Daniel Waters, he was highly valued by filmmakers for his wit, sense of storytelling structure, and lack of preciousness. He wasn't above tinkering on Michael Bay's silly "Armageddon" or Antoine Fuqua's action-comedy "Bait," which was likely because a) the money was good and b) he knew more fulfilling studio projects like "The Bourne Identity" were in the offing.

Like many successful screenwriters, Gilroy was also keen to direct. He bolted straight out of the gate with his masterpiece "Michael Clayton" (which earned him Oscar nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay) and followed that up two years later with the massively under-appreciated caper comedy "Duplicity" starring Julia Roberts and Clive Owen. He then returned to IP filmmaking in 2012 with the disappointing "The Bourne Legacy" before diving headlong into franchise obligation by righting Lucasfilm's listing "Rogue One." As Gilroy said of his work on the "Star Wars" prequel, "[T]hey were in such a swamp [...] they were in so much terrible, terrible trouble that all you could do was improve their position."

Pulling off a minor blockbuster miracle with "Rogue One" led Gilroy to make a prequel to his prequel with two seasons of critically acclaimed television in "Andor." Now that this bittersweet saga is over, Gilroy is ready to make an original movie for adults set squarely on Earth ... and what he's chosen to write and direct might surprise you.

Since "Michael Clayton" is widely considered Gilroy's finest work as a writer and director, there was some hope that he'd summon up the spirit of Alan J. Pakula again and knock out another crackerjack paranoid thriller. Consider this hope completely and utterly dashed: Gilroy's first movie after spending the better part of a decade in that galaxy far, far away will be a drama about a musician.

In an exclusive interview with /Film's Ben Pearson, Gilroy revealed that his next film is "a movie about movie music, about scoring and musicians, and the scoring musicians." Fans of the "Star Wars" sequel trilogy should be especially stoked about who's starring in this movie. As Gilroy told Pearson:

"It's about a cellist. Oscar Isaac is going to play the cellist. It's a cellist who comes back to L.A. from a very heavy studio, third-generation music family. He comes back to L.A. for a few months to do sessions on movies. [...] It's [about] why he came back and why he went away, and whatever [...] It was really nice to go back and write a movie. I wrote very quickly. I was in really good shape and wrote much more sharply than I probably would've done it five years ago."

This would be the "Behemoth!" project that we first heard about last March. There were no plot details at the time, and, now that we know them, there doesn't seem to be any need for secrecy. This first and foremost sounds like a family drama, but I have to wonder if Gilroy will address the miserable working conditions under which scoring musicians are currently toiling. According to a 2022 Vanity Fair article, top composers force their musicians to work long hours and, at times, write the actual cues themselves. As a lifelong lover of movie music, this is a huge bummer, so it would be cool if Gilroy shone a spotlight on this kind of behavior.

This could, of course, be too big of an issue for Gilroy to bite off, especially if this is a more intimate character study. We'll have to wait and see, but, for now, it's heartening to have Gilroy making movies about regular ol' human beings again.