40-Day Shoot Begins Next Week
Will this be the film that gets director Joe Carnahan back in our good books after “The A-Team” and the overrated “Smokin’ Aces“? Let’s hope so.
His next film, “The Grey,” is an indie project with a gritty premise. The film focuses on a group of pipeline workers in Alaska who are flying back into civilization after being remote for a number of months. The 737 they’re on goes down, and they begin to be hunted by a pack of rogue wolves. Bradley Cooper was originally set to star, but was replaced by Liam Neeson last fall. Word then went quiet on the project but it’s all systems go as the film now has a cast and is set to go in front of cameras next week. “Rubicon” stars Dallas Roberts and James Badge Dale, Dermot Mulroney, Frank Grillo (Gavin O’Connor‘s upcoming “Warrior” with Tom Hardy), Nonso Anozie (“Brighton Rock“), and Joe Anderson (“The Crazies,” “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn“) are all on board and headed to Canada to begin lensing.
“I haven’t had a situation like this since ‘Narc,’ where there’s no distributor, but you get to make the movie you want to, staying as light on your feet as you can,” Carnahan tells Deadline about shooting the film independently.
Filming will take place in Vancouver and in Northern British Columbia where the cast and crew are going to facing a fierce Canadian winter that Carnahan thinks is ideal for the characters. “It gets to be 30 below, and when we went out the other day, I took off my hat to see how long I could last, and my skin was burning with frostbite in a little over a minute,” Carnahan said. “In a way, it’s great, because it beats the shit out of the cast and that suits the storyline.”
Carnahan is positively psyched about the project which he compares to “Deliverance” and “Touching the Void.” It certainly sounds potentially great, provided the tension is ratcheted up and it’s not just dudes running up trees away from wolves. No release date or distributor has yet been set.
