Tony Gilroy’s Next Film Ditches Galaxies for Cellos, with Oscar Isaac Set to Star
After years immersed in the intricate, morally gray politics of Andor and the sprawling machinery of Star Wars, Tony Gilroy is making a sharp turn toward something more grounded and personal.
The filmmaker, best known for Michael Clayton, the Bourne films, and his miraculous salvage of Rogue One, is setting his sights on a very different kind of story: a drama about a cellist.
In an interview with /Film, Gilroy revealed that his next project is “a movie about movie music, about scoring and musicians, and the scoring musicians.”
The story centers on a symphonic cellist who returns to Los Angeles after years away. “Oscar Isaac is going to play the cellist,” Gilroy said. “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.”
The film, which may be the mysterious “Behemoth!” project that made a quiet splash in trades last year is shaping up to be a meditative, music-driven character piece.
For Gilroy, this is a personal project. Speaking with Variety, he explained, “I was a musician when I was young. I really was serious about it for a while. I loved being in recording studios… When we get to the scoring, it’s my happiest place.”
That connection is what drives the film’s narrative structure, which Gilroy describes as nonlinear and musical in nature. “The whole movie is told through the [music] cues—the cues trigger flashbacks over the last 20 years that tell you why he left and why he’s come back,” he said. “It’s a movie that surfs on music.”
Gilroy wrote the script quickly, and said he was “in really good shape and wrote much more sharply than I probably would've done it five years ago.”
He’s producing the film with Andor executive producer Sanne Wohlenberg, and his brother, composer John Gilroy, is also onboard. While they’ve secured Oscar Isaac, a tax credit, and the creative team, the biggest challenge now? Shooting in Los Angeles.
“It’s really difficult to shoot in L.A., as everyone knows,” Gilroy said. “And it’s about film scoring, which most of the people in your audience know is really like coral reefs, man. It’s just going away, and if it doesn’t get saved soon, it really will die completely.”
That’s quite a critique on the harsh realities of modern scoring work. As Vanity Fair reported in 2022, many musicians in Hollywood face grueling hours and unfair conditions, often ghostwriting cues under top-billed composers. Whether Gilroy plans to address this directly is unclear, but the way he tells his stories, I imagine it’s not off the table.
This sounds like a crazy ambitious project, and I hope that he manages to get it off the ground.