Looks like George Clooney is starting to feel more comfortable on the director’s chair than in front of the cameras lately. After being nominated for the Golden Lion last year at the Venice Film Festival with his thriller Suburbicon (2017), also written by Clooney together with the Coen Brothers and Grant Heslov, the popular actor and filmmaker is in negotiations with 20th Century Fox to be in charge of the science-fiction thriller Echo.
The movie is set up with 21 Laps Entertainment, the people who brought us the magnificent Arrival (2016) a couple of years ago, another science-fiction thriller about a linguist recruited by the military to communicate with alien lifeforms after twelve mysterious spacecraft land around the world.
Echo centers on a drone specialist who has a psychological crisis after suspecting that his lover is not who she appears to be and wondering whether she has been replaced. The fiction has been written by Christopher MacBride, a writer and director who achieved some notability with his debut film, the horror thriller The Conspiracy (2012). MacBride is currently undergoing pre-production for his upcoming film, The Education of Fredrick Fitzell (2019), another thriller about people who are not what they seem to be.
Although he is known for the big audience for his drama and politically oriented thrillers, we should never forget George Clooney started his already successful career in horror flicks of doubtful good taste but lots of fun, such as Grizzly II: The Concert (1983), Return to Horror High (1987) and Return of the Killer Tomatoes! (1988). Soon he carved himself the status of a TV star, which is something that did a U-turn after his starring on Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s vampire extravaganza From Dusk Till Dawn (1996). After that, and despite some hard-to-deal-with disasters like Batman & Robin (1997), everything went north for the performer. A habitual collaborator of Steven Soderbergh in titles like Out of Sight (1998) or Ocean’s Eleven (2001) and its sequels, or the Coen Brothers in comedies like with O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) or Burn After Reading (2008), Clooney’s work has been for the last couple of decades a synonymous of interesting works and attractive performances.
It was in the early new century when he decided to try the position of director debuting with the biography crime Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002). The result was so positive, achieving several nominations and winnings at many prestigious festivals, that he has signed to date 5 more movies as a director. Clooney is currently working on Catch-22 (2019– ) crime TV mini-series, due to be aired next year, which he is also directing and starring. This is his first work as an actor since Money Monster (2016). Yes, indeed he is feeling comfortable sitting on the director’s chair.
