Edgar Wright to make ghost movie set in Hollywood studio back lots
Brit director is right in the heart of La La Land for his next project.
Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright will develop, direct and executive produce a comic ghost story, Stage 13, set in the back lots of a major Hollywood studio.
The British director, who helmed the ‘Cornetto trilogy’ of Shaun, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End, has a burgeoning career in Hollywood courtesy of films such as Baby Driver.
Deadline reports the Stage 13 project is based on a short story by Saturday Night Live writer Simon Rich about a silent film star who has haunted the back lot of her studio and somehow manages to meet and communicate with a director in the modern day. The pair form an unlikely liaison and, with his corporeal body and her phantom brain, conspire to take on the movie world. It reads as if Wright has not forgotten the comic sensibilities at the heart of much of his work.
Wright will co-produce Stage 13 with his usual collaborator Nira Park for Amblin Pictures, plus legendary Working Title co-producers Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, who have worked with the Dorset-born director since Shaun of the Dead in 2004.
Before he gets to Stage 13, however, the 46-year-old director has an expanding list of movies to complete. Last Night in Soho, co-starring Matt Smith and Jojo Rabbit's Thomasin McKenzie, is a thriller about a young woman who manages to time-travel back to ‘60s London and is currently in post-production.
Wright will also direct the big screen version of the 2019 novel The Chain. The novel has been adapted by Jane Goldman and is a riff on the conventional kidnapping thriller.
In The Chain, a mother, Rachel, learns that her daughter has been kidnapped and the only way she can get her back is to kidnap another child. The parents of that child then have to kidnap another child and so on. Of course, if anyone breaks The Chain, someone is going to get badly hurt.
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