Zack Snyder is finally tackling his passion project, and there is not a single cape, zombie or rebellious moon in sight.
Starting later this month, Snyder will begin filming The Last Photograph, a drama that he originated and has been developing since the mid-2000s.
Stuart Martin and Fra Free, both of whom appeared in Snyder’s Rebel Moon movies, will star in the feature, an indie whose budget will be significantly lower than many of the epics Snyder has captained before.
Snyder is producing with creative partner and wife Deborah Snyder and Wesley Coller via their Stone Quarry banner. Also producing will be Gianni Nunnari and his Hollywood Gang Productions company.
The project, a war drama, will shoot in several locales around the globe, including Colombia, Iceland and Los Angeles.
Local companies will assist in producing in the film’s the far-flung locations. Executive producers include the Spanish company Mediaset España, through its film production arm Telecinco Cinema, as well as William Doyle and Columbia’s Jaguar Bite, which is run by Juan Pablo Solano and Simon Beltran. True North serves as the production service company in Iceland.
Photograph is qualifying for Colombia’s CINA incentive (Audiovisual Investment Certificate), which is a tax discount equivalent to 35 percent of the expenditure on audiovisual services in the country.
Snyder also has his composers lined up as well: Hans Zimmer, Steven Doar and Omer Benyamin.
Longtime Snyder colleague Kurt Johnstad wrote the script after working with Snyder on 300 and Rebel Moon. It is based on a story from Snyder.
The story, according to the producers, is thus: “An ex-DEA operative must return to the mountains of South America in an effort to find his missing niece and nephew, following the brutal murders of their diplomat parents. Enlisting the help of a washed-up junkie war photographer, the only person to have seen the face of the killers, he sets out, determined to find the children and the truth, but soon learns he must also face the ghosts of his past. Their journey into the unknown takes them further and further away from civilization, bringing into question everything they believe, while slowly eroding the distinction between real and surreal.”
The project has gone under some changes during its 20 years or so in development. For one, the setting used to be Afghanistan and centered on a war correspondent being the lone survivor of an attack on a group of Americans. In the early 2010s, Christian Bale and Sean Penn were attached to star, before Snyder took a detour into his DC movies.
“The idea of taking camera in hand and simply making a movie in an intimate way is very appealing to me,” Snyder said in a statement provided to The Hollywood Reporter. “The Last Photograph is a meditation of life and death, embodying some of the trials that I have experienced in my own life and the exploration of those ideas through image making.”
Snyder has several movie projects in development, among them an MMA slugfest titled Brawler and an action thriller centered around the LAPD.