Ridley Scott has told Comingsoon’s Edward Douglas that his next project will be a Middle Eastern drama based on a forthcoming book (due in March ’07) by journalist David Ignatius called “Penetration”, and that the script will be written by Departed scribe William Monahan. “It’s really about what’s happening now in the Middle East, our complete misunderstanding of what’s going on and how we’re not dealing with it,” Scott tells Douglas. “Inevitably, [it gets] into the heat in terms of a man who is actually a par journalist that gets sucked into working on a peripheral level in a special department where he gets into real trouble in the Middle East. But it’s so accurate.” In other words, something Syriana-ish served with Scott’s usual visual pizazz?