Tony Gilroy, the screenwriter behind the Bourne trilogy and Michael Clayton, returns to directing for the BFI Patrons' Gala's premiere of Behemoth! at the Royal Festival Hall.
The Royal Festival Hall hosts the international premiere of Tony Gilroy’s Behemoth! on Tuesday 13 October 2026, as the BFI Patrons’ Gala at the seventieth London Film Festival.
Gilroy was born in New York in 1956 and spent two decades as one of the most reliable screenwriters in American cinema before he directed anything. He wrote the first three Bourne films, then wrote and directed Michael Clayton in 2007, which brought him Academy Award nominations for both direction and original screenplay, and Duplicity two years after that. He co-wrote Rogue One and then created Andor, which is where a new audience found him a decade later, and Behemoth! is his first feature as director since 2012.
The film is a portrait of a cello prodigy who has spent his adult life changing orchestra chairs and lovers’ beds, and who retreats to a Los Angeles scoring studio to escape his latest affair. Pedro Pascal plays him, with Olivia Wilde, Eva Victor and Will Arnett, and Gilroy directs from his own screenplay. The subject is the one his scripts keep returning to: a competent man who has run out of places to be competent in.
The Gala screening repeats in the same hall the next morning, with a further London date at Vue West End on Friday 16 October, before Searchlight Pictures takes Behemoth! into cinemas across Britain.