Max Sylvester (Photo credit: ABC News).
Anthony Hayes and Daniel Krige have secured the screen rights to the heroic story of Max Sylvester, the student pilot who managed to safely land a Cessna in Perth after his instructor passed out mid-flight.
Hayes and Krige are writing and plan to co-direct the 90-minute feature, working title Flight School, with events unfolding in real time.
The duo, who first collaborated on Krige’s 2007 crime drama West, aim to raise $500,000 from crowd-funding site Indiegogo and then seek completion funding from Screen Australia.
Sylvester, 29, called air traffic control just over an hour into his lesson at Perth’s Jandakot Airport one Saturday afternoon in September after his instructor collapsed.
During one very intense hour the air traffic controller coached Sylvester on how to fly and land the plane while his wife and three young children waited anxiously on the ground.
“It’s an insane story which has the potential to reach a worldwide market following the international press coverage,” Hayes tells IF.
Hayes and Krige are drawing on a transcript of the exchanges between the air traffic controller and the young pilot, and interviews with Sylvester and his wife Olivia.
On the Indiegogo page Hayes observes: “This is the story of an ordinary man in an extraordinary situation. A dad and husband overcoming his greatest test. It’s about the man in the control tower who helped talk him down to safety, to the staff at Jandakot Airport who looked after Max’s kids and shielded them from the impending tragedy and Max’s brave wife, Olivia, who held it all together on the ground and prayed for her husband’s safe return.
“There are many heroes to this unique story. This film is an unnerving, heartfelt, emotional thriller set in real time, with the happiest and most extraordinary ending.”
Hayes tells IF he decided to take the crowdfunding route as it’s not the sort of subject the funding agencies would normally support and he wants to make the film soon to capitalise on the international interest.
Hayes and Krige have also co-written an 8-part TV series based on the Myall Creek Massacre in 1838, when white settlers murdered 28 Aboriginal men, women and children – one of the rare cases where killers were tried and hanged.
UK brothers Harry and Jack Williams of Two Brothers Pictures (Fleabag, The Missing), whom Hayes met last year when he starred in their UK-Hong Kong crime drama White Dragon, have commissioned the project.
He is keen to hire an Indigenous director and to shoot the series based on Mark Tedeschi’s book Murder at Myall Creek in Australia as a UK-Australian co-production.