Writer and sometime director Scott Z. Burns’ next movie, Contagion, is directed by that little-known director, Steven Soderbergh, and everything we’ve seen from it has looked fantastic so far. If you’ve missed it, you can catch the trailer here.
The Playlist report that his next project, The Side Effects, will see him return behind the camera for a feature film for the first time since 2006’s Pu-239, starring Paddy Considine, his writing and directorial debut.
Burns’ writing credits are more than a little impressive, including The Bourne Ultimatum, the Golden Globe-nominated The Informant!, and Steven Soderbergh’s upcoming The Man From U.N.C.L.E., and he produced the Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. Certainly not a résumé to overlook lightly.
His work writing Contagion has me especially interested, and this news of his next project is definitely something to look forward to as well.
“It deals with people and their moods. It’s about how we as a society can’t tolerate sadness and what that makes us vulnerable to… It’s definitely got a twist… It’s a story where it’s like if someone were listening to the conversation you and I were having and thought ‘Hmmm, if that’s the way that society is working how can I manipulate that, how can I use that?’ And that’s what the movie’s about.”
It might also be worth mentioning that Ti West, frequent horror director of such films as The House of the Devil and the upcoming The Innkeepers, also has a new project in the works called The Side Effects, which will see him branching into the sci-fi genre. But as long as the two films aren’t released alongside each other, it shouldn’t be too difficult to keep the projects separate in our minds, and both should be something to keep an eye on.
Burns’ The Side Effects sounds like it already has a lot of potential. He says that the script, which he’s written himself, is already finished, and he’s hoping to begin casting after the weekend. Brilliant stuff, very exciting. Lorenzo di Bonaventura (Red, all three Transformers films) is going to be producing for Burns, and work on it will hopefully be starting very soon.
“It should be really great to get back to being behind the camera and hopefully using some of the things I’ve learned.”
