Bryan Cranston is the king of the world, having just signed a deal for a final season of Breaking Bad, and directors falling over themselves to give him parts in big Hollywood movies. And now he’s planning to step behind the camera and direct.
Some websites were lucky enough to go down to the set of Total Recal, which Cranston is starring in as one of the bad guys, and spoke to him. Here’s what he had to say about his directorial debut, according to Movieweb, “I wrote something that I adapted from a novel that I handed to Mark Johnson, our (Breaking Bad) executive producer and a feature film producer, and he loved it so he said, ‘Let’s do this.’ So I’ll direct that, maybe next year, it depends. I don’t know where Breaking Bad is gonna fit into this, I know we’re gonna go at least one more year (it’s since been confirmed a deal has been struck to complete the show after the next season), but I don’t know when we’ll start.
“It’s based on a novel called Home Again by David Wiltse. I’ll change the title of it, but it’s basically a very strong father-son story and a murder mystery. An FBI agent who suddenly quits the department and takes his son and his wife and moves back to his hometown of Cascade, Nebraska to rekindle family values and pay attention now because he’s been working for the FBI for so many years that he’s been home sporadically, and his son is now 16, very sensitive, and looks upon his father like sort of a stranger, ‘I don’t know really how to behave’ and ‘Mom and I have gotten along fine without him’ and now there’s this presence, so there’s all that going on. And then there’s a murder that happens in the little town that they move to which kills his whole stance on, ‘Things are better in these small towns!’ Things unravel, and basically the father and son come together at the end and save each other emotionally and literally.”
With Cranston a hugely in-demand actor at the moment, who knows when he’ll get round to this. We’ll just have to wait and see.