The Road will get an expanded release in the U.S. on December 18. Brad Brevet at Rope of Silicon writes:
On December 18, The Road will be expanding and I have been told by a Weinstein Co. rep they are targeting 53 additional markets around the US. Now when I say “targeting” that means they are still working on confirming theatres. So while your city’s name may be on this list it still isn’t 100-percent confirmed.
And Collider has the first few pics of Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone, which premieres next month at Sundance. You can find them here.
The Sundance Film Festival has released the lineup for 2010. Winter’s Bone is one of the films that will be screened in the U.S. Dramatic Competition program.
Winter’s Bone (Director: Debra Granik; Screenwriters: Debra Granik and Anne Rosellini)—An unflinching Ozark Mountain girl hacks through dangerous social terrain as she hunts down her drug-dealing father while trying to keep her family intact. Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Dale Dickey, Garret Dillahunt, Kevin Breznahan. World Premiere.
The shorts lineup will be announced on Monday, December 7. One Night Only should be among the contenders.
The UK trailer for The Road has appeared online at Guardian.co.uk. The film opens in the UK in January.
And speaking of, The Road has been nominated for a Golden Satellite award, Best Art Direction category.
Best Art Direction
Terry Gilliam, Dave Warren and Anastasia Masaro, “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus”
Nathan Crowley, Patrick Lumb and William Ladd Skinner, “Public Enemies”
Eddy Wong, “Red Cliff”
Chris Kennedy, “The Road”
Ian Philips and Dan Bishop, “A Single Man”
Barry Chusid and Elizabeth Wilcox, “2012” [Indiewire.com]
Baryo went into pre-production in November. The team is already on location in the Philippines. They set up a blog, The Baryo Film Project, so that’s the place to look for updates. Filming doesn’t start till February.
The Hollywood Reporter had a brief announcement about Garret joining Keep Hope Alive the other day.
Garret Dillahunt has landed a co-starring role on Greg Garcia’s comedy pilot for Fox, “Keep Hope Alive.”
The show centers on Jimmy (Lucas Neff), a 25-year-old man raising an infant with the help of his quirky family after the mother of the baby, with whom he had a one-night stand, ends up on death row.
Dillahunt will play Jimmy’s dysfunctional father and boss, who is not thrilled to find himself a grandfather and worries that the baby might carry her mom’s homicidal gene.
Last week, they were looking for a couple of teens to play the young Garret and Martha Plimpton. [JaxObserver.com]
And finally, some footage from Water Pills has emerged on Justin Mitchell’s site. He was the director of photography on the film. You can see the clip here. Credit goes to Winona-Ryder.org for finding it.
OK, one more. Burn Notice will return a week earlier than originally announced, on Thursday, January 21 at 10/9c. This means that the season three finale will air some time in early March, as expected.
This British film site has posted a new interview with Carlos Brooks, who co-directed Burning Bright with the tigers. No definite release date yet, but at least things seem to be moving in that direction.
Carlos Brooks:Burning Bright is about an incredibly HOT CHICK trapped in a house with a TIGER during a HURRICANE. We had another version that explored the latent Freudian implications of her existential dilemma in terms of various indigenous animal myths, but we were running long, and something had to go… Oh yeah, and she has to face off with her demented stepfather, played by the brilliant Garret Dillahunt [The Road, The Last House On The Left – Ed], and all the while protecting her tripped-out little brother, played by newcomer prodigy Charlie Tahan. (…)
What was your reaction when you first read the screenplay? Because ours was ‘this sounds absolutely mental’.
Carlos Brooks: My first reaction, after I got over the crazy-sounding pitch, was to the extremely well crafted screenplay – which takes you by the hand and walks you into rural Florida where you have these low-rent wild animal preserves in people’s back yards, and where houses routinely get boarded up to protect from epic hurricanes.
Throw in a homicidal circus tiger bought on the cheap and one demented stepfather, and you have a story unlike that which we’ve ever seen, all of it rooted in reality. I found myself caught up in the girl’s struggle, and in the movie she becomes much more than just “the hot chick” – she becomes a thinking hero who has to use her wits and her household surroundings to outwit a natural predator who just happens to be stalking her from kitchen to bedroom. (…)
Did you have any tiger related accidents on the set? Did it take your direction well?
Carlos Brooks: No, the tiger didn’t like my direction. You find out early on that the tiger will rewrite your script for you. You may want the tiger to peer over the kitchen island. Then when you say “Action!” you find out the tiger’s idea is to actually leap up onto the island and crash into the hanging pots. You go with the tiger’s version. There were three tigers, actually. Once or twice they got loose on the set, but the trainers were the best in the business — had to be, we were getting very aggressive behavior. Nobody got hurt. Traumatized, perhaps. No injuries. (…)
Any news on a worldwide release? Will Burning Bright be released in cinemas or on DVD/Blu-Ray?
Carlos Brooks: None yet. Theatrical is still in the offing – we’re holding out. Of course it will be available on DVD worldwide, but the movie is worth seeing in the cinema. It’s a tough market these days, but this movie was made for movie lovers who actually still go out to the cinemas. Fortunately, everybody behind it believes in it so stay tuned. [TheShiznit.co.uk]
The Road finally hits the theatres in the U.S. tomorrow (November 25). You can find the showtimes on Fandango.
Here is a behind the scenes featurette that showed up online this week:
And all the international release dates available on IMDb:
Canada – 27 November 2009 France – 2 December 2009 Greece – 10 December 2009 Russia – 10 December 2009 Finland – 25 December 2009 Belgium – January 2010 Norway – January 2010 South Korea – 7 January 2010 UK – 8 January 2010 Slovenia – 14 January 2010 Argentina – 21 January 2010 Estonia – 22 January 2010 Sweden – 22 January 2010 Australia – 28 January 2010 Netherlands – 4 February 2010 Brazil – 5 February 2010 New Zealand – 18 March 2010
Some film news. Garret will be joining Chris Cooper (American Beauty, Seabiscuit, Breach) in a new film from John Sayles (Matewan, Eight Men Out, Limbo, Sunshine State), tentatively titled Baryo. The film is set in the Philippines during the period leading up to the Spanish-American war in 1898 and will focus on the events that happen to the military in the baryo (Filipino for ‘barrio’). Garret will play Lt. Compton, one of the American officers stationed in the country. Filming starts in February in the Philippines (beforeUnbound Captives).
Sayles and Cooper have worked together a number of times and neither of them is stranger to awards. Cooper won an Oscar for Adaptation and Sayles was nominated twice for best original screenplay (Passion Fish, Lone Star).
Here is some background on Sayles’ interest in the period, from a Los Angeles Times article dated May 26, 2009, about his novel “Some Time in the Sun,” which deals with similar themes as the film:
Some 10 years ago he began to write a movie about America’s 1898 war with Spain over the Philippines, viewing it as an eerie precursor of U.S. military exploits in Vietnam. He was also fascinated by the last gasp of Reconstruction — the era of virulent, post-Civil War racism. These two story lines fused and the script became unwieldy.
“There was no way in hell we were ever going to raise the money to make the film,” Sayles says. “I felt like I was pushing way too much stuff into a two-hour-and-20-minute format, and it would work better as a miniseries. But who gets to come in and say, ‘Oh, I want to make a 50-part miniseries about America at the turn of the century’?”
He finally decided the story should be a novel, which led to years of research and writing. “Some Time in the Sun” — like his films — blends vivid human portraits with historical events and brilliantly captures individual voices. In addition to his raucous newsboys, it spotlights African American and white soldiers fighting in the Philippines, fast-buck artists who help create the motion picture industry, and features cameos by Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, William Randolph Hearst, Damon Runyon and other historical figures. [Los Angeles Times]
