Having conquered reverse aging with The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, screenwriter Eric Roth is aiming for something larger with his next project - A space opera that crosses George Lucas and Arthur C. Clarke.

Talking to Collider.com, Roth - who also wrote the screenplays for Forrest Gump and Munich, amongst others - revealed that the big project that he wants to follow up Benjamin Button with is what he calls "a big space…I don’t want to say odyssey…that’s been done, but a space movie":

I want it to be—and I don’t know 100%—but I mean this is such a wide range, but I think it’s somewhere between the intelligence of “2001” and the mythology of “Star Wars”, so I don’t know where that leads you. But I don’t want to make it so intellectual that it’s confounding, but on the other hand I’m not so sure I can write the kind of wonderful fantasy that Lucas does, so maybe it would have…I don’t know…I don’t know. I can’t answer that because they’re going let me just sort of say fade in and see where I go.

While it's good to be ambitious, there's something worrying about Roth's seeming uncertainness about this particular ambition - Instead of the new Star Wars, is his feeling that he can't write Lucas-esque fantasy going to give us the new Phantom Menace?

Exclusive: Screenwriter Eric Roth is Writing a Sci-fi Film for Warner Brothers! [Collider]

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