When IF catches up with Richard Gray, he is in Los Angeles, in the midst of putting together a cut for supernatural thriller Mine Games.
“It’s really exciting actually,” he says. “We’ve had some great calls from studios, so will be scheduling some screenings shortly. All fun stuff.”
Described by Gray as Deliverance meets Donnie Darko, the film follows a group of young friends as they make a shocking discovery in an abandoned mine. When time loops back on itself, and they realize that one of them will be responsible for the death of the others, they struggle to change the future, only to find that this serves to seal their fate.
It may seem an unusual follow up choice after last year’s romantic drama Summer Coda, which starred Rachael Taylor and Alex Dimitriades. But Gray says it is an area he has been looking into for quite some time.
After coming across an early version of the script written by fellow Australians Ross McQueen and Robert Cross, Gray worked closely with McQueen and his wife Michele Davis-Gray to bring the screenplay to a place where they felt it would offer something original in an already overcrowded genre.
“It's an adventure but there's certainly an intense building of dread,” he says. “It's by no means a slasher and with a bit of luck it will stand up well on repeat viewing.”
The six-week shoot took place on locations an hour outside of Seattle, Washington. The crew was a mixture of Australians and Americans.
“What was interesting was the hundreds of little differences in the way a set is run here,” says Gray. “I think our US crew admired how hard us Aussies work too, our multiple skill sets particularly.”
Mine Games was shot on the RED EPIC camera and will be released in the US next year.
Richard Gray on the set of Mine Games.