EXCLUSIVE: Here’s your first footage of Reacher star Alan Ritchson in new action-thriller Motor City, which is debuting tomorrow at the Venice Film Festival before heading to Toronto.
Ritchson stars alongside Shailene Woodley, Ben Foster and Pablo Schreiber in the kinetic movie, which is set in 1970s Detroit and charts the story of a man who plots revenge against the criminals who framed him for a crime he didn’t commit, leading him to lose the love of his life, played by Woodley.
The film features a kick-ass soundtrack (Bill Withers, Fleetwood Mac, Donna Summer and more), balletic cinematography and has a great pace to it and some wild action set pieces. The rising Ritchson brings impressive muscle and pathos to it. But what really sets it apart is the fact it only has five lines of dialogue, a rare proposition for a $30M U.S. movie.
The Chad St John Black List script started out at Warner Bros more than a decade ago and went through multiple iterations in terms of leads and directors interested. Despite becoming an independent project it has managed to maintain impressive production scale and scope. It’s part graphic novel-part noir-part John Wick meets disco.
The movie is understood to have sold well for Black Bear internationally, the question now is who will take the plunge on domestic, which is being handled by WME Independent and Range Select. We should know more after the Toronto festival and market screening next week. It’s certainly deserves to be seen in theaters. At a time when audiences are sparking to original, gutsy genre from the studios (Sinners, Weapons of late), the movie offers another unique prospect and an invigorating creative endeavor. The minimal dialogue will be a commercial challenge. Some may see it as opportunity.
Pic heralds from Old Henry director Potsy Ponciroli. Stampede and Grammercy backed it with Black Bear handling sales. As Ponciroli told us today on a Venice panel for the movie, there was typical indie pivoting right up until shoot:
“Credit to our producers. They had made a deal with foreign financiers and were meant to shoot half the movie overseas [Saudi Arabia], and we’d built all these sets and had all our furniture, cars, sets, were taking prop guns over the border etc and three weeks before shoot that money pulled out and we had to find those locations all over again in New Jersey. That was the biggest challenge. We went from 37 days to 28 days. But the producers found more money and there was never a chance the movie was going away.”
Ben Foster told us today in Venice: “This is not a silent film. There are about five lines of dialogue. If we think about what makes us human, it’s behaviour and how we behave with each other. So it was a fun challenge to tell a story without telling the story in a traditional manner. We were able to relate physically as actors.”
Ponciroli added: “We’ve seen this type of story before, in terms of the plot, but it’s pretty different in how much it relies on emotion and physicality. There’s a four and half minute scene in a diner between Ben’s character and Shailene and it’s one of my favourite in the movie. You don’t miss the dialogue. Watching them play off each other and use the scene and their physicality was really fun.”
Ritchson couldn’t make the Venice premiere due to Reacher commitments but is aiming to be at the Toronto launch next week.