Luke Bracey.
Director Kriv Stenders has added Luke Bracey, Richard Roxburgh and Daniel Webber to the cast of Danger Close, which chronicles the heroics of Australian and New Zealand soldiers in the Battle of Long Tan in the Vietnam War.
As announced Travis Fimmel (TV’s Vikings, Warcraft: The Beginning) will play Major Harry Smith, who led the largely inexperienced company of 108 men who held off about 2,500 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers for three and a half hours in torrential rain on August 18 1966.
The drama scripted by Stuart Beattie, based on a story by James Nicholas, Jack Brislee, Karel Segers and Paul Sullivan, starts shooting in Queensland later this month, co-funded by the federal government and Screen Queensland. Bracey will play a sergeant with Roxburgh as a brigadier and Webber as a private.
The producers are Red Dune Productions’ Martin Walsh and Deeper Water’s John and Michael Schwarz. Transmission Films will distribute in Australia/New Zealand.
New York-based Saboteur Media will pitch the project to buyers at the Cannes Film Market next week. “With the full support of the Australian film community as well as the Australian military services there is a great deal of goodwill behind this project. With Kriv Stenders directing a high profile cast with an amazing script from Stuart Beattie we are confident the movie will appeal to audiences worldwide,” said Saboteur’s director of distribution Mark Lindsay.
Stenders added: “I knew immediately when I finished the last page that this is a film I had to make, a story I needed to tell. This is the most ambitious film I have ever directed and one of the most ambitious films coming out of Australia in the last 30 years.
The experienced crew includes DOP Ben Nott (Winchester, Jigsaw, Predestination), costume designer Lizzie Gardiner (Peter Rabbit, Hacksaw Ridge, The Railway Man), production designer Sam Hobbs (Red Dog: True Blue, The Kettering Incident) and special effects supervisor Brian Cox (Aquaman, Thor: Ragnarok).
Fimmel will next be seen in director Miles Joris-Peyrafitte’s thriller Dreamland with Margot Robbie and in Mark Steven Johnson’s crime-romance Finding Steve McQueen with Forest Whitaker and Rachael Taylor.
Bracey, who broke through in Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge and appeared in the Point Break reboot, stars in Roger Avary’s upcoming crime thriller Lucky Day and in Janusz Kaminski’s drama American Dream.