Australian filmmaker Rupert Glasson today launched a crowdfunding campaign to complete his US-set road movie What Lola Wants, which stars Sophie Lowe, Beau Knapp and Robert Taylor.
Glasson hopes the film will be a springboard for his next, rather more ambitious project, The Vault, a futuristic film in which the “villains” are Australia’s banks.
The plan is to shoot in Melbourne next March, produced by Ayisha Davies (with whom he collaborated on Lola) and David Lightfoot of Ultrafilms.
“Lola is an entree to the main course – a larger film we're putting together for next year called The Vault," Glasson tells IF. “It's a bank heist set in a near-future Australia where the banks are over-invested in mining projects.
“When the Chinese economy stutters and stalls those loans go bad and the banks teeter on the edge of collapse. So they stop lending, they call everything in – home loans, business loans, everything. Property prices collapse, families are thrown into the street. Disaster.
“The banks shutter 75% of their branches and lay-off thousands of staff. The manager and staff of one of these branches decide enough is enough: They decide to rob their own bank.”
Casting is underway, handled by Mullinars Casting Consultants. The subject seems highly topical given the inquiry into the financial services sector but Glasson wrote the script before he did What Lola Wants.
Cast and crew spent 18 days last year shooting that film in the California desert. Via Indiegogo he aims to raise $40,000 towards the final sound mix, visual effects and delivery.
CAA reps the film in North America and he’s in discussions with international sales companies. The music has been composed by John Gray, who scored Glasson’s first movie Coffin Rock.
Lowe plays the title character, who runs away from home and fakes her disappearance as a kidnapping. In a desert diner she meets Marlo (Knapp), they fall in love and head for Mobile, Alabama. Her famous parents offer a reward of $1 million for her safe return.
Taylor (who plays the lead in TV’s Longmire) is Jed, who tries to detain Lola and collect the reward for himself. Dale Dickey (Winter’s Bone) plays a bad-ass named Mama and Charles S. Dutton is a cop.
Find out more here.