Two Australian actors who are emerging on the international scene have been cast as the leads in Fell, the first feature from director Kasimir Burgess.
Matt Nable will play a guy whose daughter is killed in a hit-and-run accident. Daniel Henshall will play Luke, the driver who is sent to jail for five years. When Luke is released, Nable‘s character changes his identity and plots revenge.
The screenplay is by Natasha Pincus, based on a story she wrote with Burgess, whose short film Lily won the Crystal Bear at the 2011 Berlin International Film Festival.
The producers are John Maynard and Mary Minas, with Bridget Ikin as executive producer. The nine-week shoot starts at the end of July in and around Warburton in country Victoria.
Nable has just completed roles in the movie Riddick, the third instalment in The Chronicles of Riddick series which stars Vin Diesel and Karl Urban, and in Julius Avery’s crime thriller Son of a Gun, which features Ewan McGregor, Brenton Thwaites, Jacek Koman and Swedish actress Alicia Vikander (A Royal Affair, Anna Karenina).
His credits include producer Robert Connolly’s omnibus film The Turning and Sarah Spillane’s Around the Block, the saga of an Aboriginal boy who’s torn between his passion for acting and the disintegration of his family, starring Christina Ricci, Jack Thompson, Hunter Page-Lochard, Madeleine Madden and Damian Walshe-Howling.
Henshall, who made his breakthrough in Snowtown, stars alongside fellow Aussie Meegan Warner in the US network AMC’s drama pilot Turn, written by Nikita creator/executive producer Craig Silverstein and directed by Rise Of The Planet of The Apes’ Rupert Wyatt. Set in 1771, it’s the story of a New York farmer Abe Woodhull, who joins with a group of childhood friends to form a band of spies who turn the tide in America’s fight for independence.
Henshall has completed two Australian films, Jennifer Kent's The Babadook, a psychological-thriller starring Essie Davis, and These Final Hours, Zak Hilditch’s Apocalyptic thriller which co-stars Nathan Phillips, Jessica De Gouw and Sarah Snook. He's also in Around the Block.
Fell is funded by Screen Australia, Film Victoria and the producer offset. It will be co-distributed by Maynard’s Footprint Films and Transmission Films, and international sales are being handled by the Helsinki and Stockholm-based The Yellow Affair. The DOP is Martin Dean, who went to the Victorian College of the Arts film and TV school with Burgess.
Maynard tells IF the production will utilise a crew of just 15 people, the same number as the unit that filmed Balibo in Timor. He contrasts that lean-and-mean shooting style with his production of Romulus, My Father, which employed a crew of 66.