Damien Power (Photo credit: Shutterstock).
In his Hollywood debut Damien Power will direct No Exit, a thriller based on a novel by Taylor Adams, for 20th Century Fox.
Adapted by Andrew Barrer and Gabe Ferrari (Ant-Man and the Wasp), the plot follows college student Darby Thorne, who, while on the way home to visit her mother, gets stranded in a blizzard at a highway rest stop with four strangers.
During the night Thorne discovers a little girl locked in the boot of one of the cars but she doesn’t know whose car. Without cell or phone reception and trapped by the snow, she must figure out who is the kidnapper.
The producer is Scott Frank, who wrote the screenplay of Fox’s Wolverine adventure Logan, which starred Hugh Jackman. Frank also created, wrote and directed Netflix’s Western series Godless.
It will be Power’s second feature following his debut Killing Ground, which starred Aaron Pedersen, Harriet Dyer, Ian Meadows, Aaron Glenane, Maya Strange and Tiarnie Coupland.
The horror movie about two campers who discover a distressed child wandering in the woods, which leads to a terrifying chain of events, premiered at Sundance and was released in the US by IFC Midnight, the genre arm of IFC Films.
Subsequently he signed with CAA and managers Brillstein Entertainment Partners. He moved to ICM late last year after his CAA agent left the business.
“It proved to be a great move: my team at ICM brought me No Exit,” Power tells IF. “I read the screenplay and the novel and felt it had been written for me to direct.
“I’ve read a lot of scripts since Killing Ground played at Sundance and I secured US representation, and it’s rare for something to click like this.
“I’m excited to work with producer Scott Frank and the writers Andrew Barrer and Gabe Ferrari and everybody at Fox. Ready to deliver another edge-of-your-seat experience.”
Frank is also set to rewrite The Force, the adaptation of the bestselling NYPD corrupt cop thriller novel by Don Winslow, for Fox, which will reunite him with Logan helmer James Mangold.
His other credits include Out of Sight, Get Shorty, Minority Report and Marley & Me.