Director Justin Kurzel has begun pre-production in London on Macbeth, which stars Michael Fassbender as the ambitious Scottish king and Marion Cotillard as the conniving Lady Macbeth.
Kurzel is working with two of his collaborators from his debut film Snowtown, cinematographer Adam Arkapaw and production designer Fiona Crombie.
The producers are See-Saw Films’ Iain Canning and Emile Sherman, whose credits include Tracks, Top of the Lake, Shame, Dead Europe and The King’s Speech.
Crombie has just finished the production design on Julius Avery’s Son of a Gun. Snowtown was her first feature, which she followed with Dead Europe and Top of the Lake.
The daughter of director Donald Crombie and former South Australian Film Corp. CEO Judith Crombie, Fiona graduated from NIDA and was the resident designer at the Sydney Theatre Co. before she embarked on short films and TVCs.
Transmission will release Macbeth in Australia. StudioCanal is co-financing the picture with England’s Film4 and handling international sales.
Shooting begins in January, around the same time as a rival Macbeth project gets underway in the UK. Sean Bean, Rupert Grint, Charles Dance and Jason Flemyng are attached to star in Enemy of Man, directed by Vincent Regan. It’s described as a retelling of Shakespeare’s timeless tale of war, regicide, betrayal and revenge.
Kurzel was due to direct the film adaptation of John Le Carré's Our Kind Of Traitor, starring Ewan McGregor, but he dropped out and the gig went to Susanna White (Parade's End, Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang).