Boiler Room and Bleed For This director Ben Younger is back with Left Seat – a plane-based thriller starring Michelle Rodriguez and Richard Gere. Michelle Rodriguez is perhaps best known for her work in the high-octane Fast And Furious franchise, so it’s perhaps fitting that she’s about to take to the skies as the lead ... Michelle Rodriguez to star in Left Seat, a thriller from the director of Boiler Room
Boiler Room and Bleed For This director Ben Younger is back with Left Seat – a plane-based thriller starring Michelle Rodriguez and Richard Gere.
Michelle Rodriguez is perhaps best known for her work in the high-octane Fast And Furious franchise, so it’s perhaps fitting that she’s about to take to the skies as the lead in a new, more contained thriller.
Left Seat will see Rodriguez play a big pharma worker who’s on a light aircraft when the pilot unexpectedly passes out. With no experience of flying a plane, she reluctantly takes the helm, with the help of Richard Gere (a chap on the other end of the radio) talking her through the controls.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, it’s a contained thriller in the mode of Locke, writer-director Steven Knight’s 2013 drama-thriller about a construction manager (Tom Hardy) having the worst night of his life. That film took place entirely in the titular Ivan Locke’s car, with each phone call over the vehicle’s speakerphone seeing his life unravel further.
Left Seat is the latest film from Ben Younger, who co-wrote the script (with David M Crabtree) and directs. An underrated filmmaker, Younger directed the terrific Boiler Room in 2000 – a financial thriller which could be seen as a companion piece to Martin Scorsese’s later The Wolf Of Wall Street. He next directed the romantic thriller, Prime (2005), starring Uma Thurman and Meryl Streep.
Younger spent several years out of the film industry after that, even working as a fry cook in a fish restaurant, before he finally got another project off the ground – the boxing drama, Bleed For This, released in 2016. Executive produced by Martin Scorsese and starring Miles Teller and Aaron Eckhart, it’s a terrific drama, and well worth seeking out. (Only lightly promoted, Bleed For This largely came and went in 2016, disappointingly.)
Ten years on, and Left Seat is a welcome return for Younger, who was just 26 when he made Boiler Room, featuring Ben Affleck and Vin Diesel in one of his best screen performances.
Indeed, it was this film that put Younger on Scorsese’s radar, and resulted in Bleed For This’s making 16 years later. Scorsese screened Boiler Room for his cast and crew ahead of the production of The Wolf Of Wall Street, and afterwards, called Younger up with an offer to get his boxing film off the ground.
“He called me on the phone,” Younger told me in 2016. “I was back in Costa Rica, cooking in a restaurant down in Malpais. And he called me and said, “I’m gonna help you make this movie.”
Between Boiler Room and Bleed For This, Younger explained, he had a “rich, interesting decade.”
“I became a pilot. I raced motorcycles semi-professionally. I had a lot of success in that. And then I cooked in a restaurant – my friend’s restaurant.”
Younger will be bringing some of that experience as a pilot, it seems, to Left Seat. We’ll bring you more on the project as we get it.
