After “CODA,” director Sian Heder probably had plenty of options to choose from when it came to what her next project might be. The sky was the limit and the industry came calling.
She’s finally chosen her Best Picture follow-up and it’s … a sci-fi movie written by Sarah Polley? That’s what Jeff Sneider is reporting on his site Above the Line.
Coming off her Best Adapted Screenplay win, Polley is set to write “The Blue Afternoon That Lasted Forever” for Heder, with Paramount producing.
Polley’s task is actually a rewrite of a script that emerged from a studio bidding war in May 2020, with the rights to Robopocalypse author Daniel H. Wilson's sci-fi spec script. She’s surely going to bring a feminist twist to it.
This is an adaptation of Wilson’s own short story. The synopsis reads as follows:
The film follows Eric, a single dad and NASA physicist who discovers a black hole that will swallow Earth in a matter of days. The problem is that no one believes him, including his colleagues at NASA. The one person who trusts him is his 10-year-old daughter, Marie, but even that bond is now being threatened. Eric finds himself trying to save both his relationship with Marie and a populace unwilling to heed his warnings of the impending disaster.
Heder showed absolutely no personality or visual style to her direction in “CODA” — she played it completely straight, almost like a TV movie, but the result was a Best Picture win. Go figure.
This latest one at least sounds a little more ambitious.