Tony Gilroy had the speech ready on his way to meet Pedro Pascal. He was rehearsing it in the car on the way to lunch. Oscar Isaac was out of “Behemoth!,” lost to what Gilroy calls “a traffic jam between ‘Frankenstein’ and awards,” and the writer-director had already pushed the start date as far as he was willing to push it for his new film about a cello player who returns to Los Angeles after 20 years.
So he and producer Sanne Wohlenberg drove to meet Pascal, but Gilroy had already worked out what he would say to the crew he had assembled: “We tried really hard. We’re not doing this movie now. I’ll find us something else.” “10 minutes into lunch, I’m like, ‘Oh my God, can he be this perfect?’” Gilroy tells Variety over coffee on the final morning of the Middleburg Film Festival.
A three-hour meeting followed that Gilroy describes as “more of a prenup than a meeting.” By the next day, Pascal was learning the cello. The result is Gilroy’s first feature as a director since 2012′ “The Bourne Legacy” and his first anything since Disney+’s “Andor,” the two-season series that consumed most of his last six years. Pascal plays Alex Serian, a cellist from a family of studio musicians who comes home to Los Angeles after two decades on the road and starts recording film scores, including a giant studio production with the secret title “Behemoth!” The film is among the Oscar contenders this year including best actor for Pascal, and with the strong reviews, perhaps even best picture.
The cast also includes Olivia Wilde, Will Arnett, Eva Victor, Alexa Swinton and Hank Azaria. The idea arrived on the scoring stage for “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” after watching Michael Giacchino’s composing sessions. Gilroy then spent six months interviewing working musicians before “Andor” swallowed him whole.
When he surfaced, he says, he was “very eager for a sanctuary” from the anger and politics of that show. He found it in a movie about movie music, which he immediately made as difficult as possible to finance. Good luck,” he says, running down the movie pitch.
I’m probably going to need nine composers.” It could not be shot in Atlanta or Australia. It needed 303 union musicians on the stage. Collective.” The terms for the nine were identical across the board: the same fee, alphabetical credits, equal billing, no individual names on the poster, publishing for all.
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