Steven Soderbergh Takes THE BITTER PILL

After exiting Warner Bros' The Man From U.N.C.L.E. recently over prolonged budgetary and casting battles and leaving many of us actually bitter that we didn't get to see such a perfect matching of director/material and star (60's spy thriller, Soderbergh, Clooney) - director Steven Soderbergh has himself decided to take The Bitter Pill. No, not suicide but a new psychological thriller that his frequent writing partner Scott Z. Burns (who had wrote The Man From U.N.C.L.E. redo for Soderbergh and also Contagion & The Informant) cooked up years ago and has been trying to pull the trigger on. Formeley titled The Side Effects, 'The Bitter Pill' is being described as a new take on Fatal Attraction and "deals with people and their moods. It€™s about how we as a society can€™t tolerate sadness and what that makes us vulnerable to", according to Burns, and which has "definitely got a twist." " He says; It€™s a story where it€™s like if someone were listening to the conversation you and I were having and thought 'Hmmm, if that€™s the way that society is working how can I manipulate that, how can I use that?' And that€™s what the movie€™s about," Burns elaborated. The idea for the film was birthed when Burns was doing research for the short lived Peter Berg TV drama Wonderland. As of a few months ago Burns was looking to direct himself but The Playlist instead say the movie has replaced The Man From U.N.C.L.E. as Soderbergh's penultimate feature film that will shoot in March before he makes the Liberace biopic for HBO with Michael Douglas and Matt Damon titled Behind the Candelabra, and then retires/takes a lengthy hiatus. Don't forget he has also just made the male stripper drama Magic Mike with Channing Tatum that is now in post-production and has his low-budget Haywire opening early next year so if you still haven't seen Contagion like myself you still have five films of Soderbergh to see before he retires, equal in number to almost the whole filmography of Sergio Leone. So as expected, Soderbergh has decided not to take a few weeks extra off in 2012 and is going to squeeze in The Bitter Pill and deliver us the same amount of movies he previously promised us before retiring. He has been vocal in the past about his fondness for Burns' script and it looks like the hold-up has been over Burns' unwillingness to let anyone else direct because he wanted a stab at it. In the end, he has probably realised there is nobody better to make the film happen than Soderbergh. The Bitter Pill will be produced by Soderbergh's regular producer/AD Gregory Jacobs and Lorenzo DiBonaventura. Summit and Paramount are circling the film the hardest and it could depend on casting which is expected to happen soon. The lead of the film is written for somebody in there 30's, so those hoping that we'd get one last George Clooney/Soderbergh team-up will have to think again...