First Trailer For Daniel Nettheim’s TIFF-Bound Adaptation Of Leigh’s Novel ‘The Hunter’
A batch of new photos from writer Julia Leigh‘s directorial debut, “Sleeping Beauty,” have been unveiled and exhibits the beautiful, perverse nature of the film we had all come to expect from their first provocative trailer.
Starring up and comer Emily Browing, the Jane Campion-backed film sees Leigh direct from her own 2008 Black Listed script originally described as “a haunting erotic fairy tale about a student who drifts into prostitution and finds her niche as a woman who sleeps, drugged, in a ‘Sleeping Beauty chamber’ while men do to her what she can‘t remember the next morning.” Mirrah Foulkes, Michael Dorman, Sarak Snook, Rachel Blake and Hugh Keays-Byrne all co-star in the pic, which recently scored a October 28th release date.
Our reviewer from Cannes noted that while it “isn’t a perfect film, but it is, in many ways, near-perfect cinema—a unique story, untellable in any other medium, that resists both easy dismissal and glib praise, sinking into the mind with the ungraspable, all-pervading power of a dream.” It’s certainly unforgettable. [via ONTD]
Leigh’s 2001 psycholgical novel “The Hunter,” meanwhile, has recently been adapted for the screen by helmer Daniel Nettheim and writer Alice Addison with Willem Dafoe, Sam Neill, Sullivan Stapleton, Morgana Davies and Frances O’Connor leading the cast. The story follows “Martin, a mercenary sent from Europe by an anonymous biotech company to the Tasmanian wilderness on a dramatic hunt for the last Tasmanian tiger.”
According to Amazon, things are further complicated by the fact that Martin “works for a biotech company. His mission: to secure genetic material from what may be the world’s last remaining thylacine, reportedly sighted on the plateau. M must hide his true occupation from Lucy and her lonely children, Sass and Bike, as well as from the National Parks researchers and the suspicious local townspeople.” Here’s the first trailer and two first look stills for the TIFF-bound film with the work of Oscar-winning ‘Lord Of The Rings’ trilogy DoP Andrew Lesnie already evident. [TIFF]