Here comes an insightful article by The Hollywood Reporter on Toni’s upcoming film “Stowaway”. Almost exactly a year ago, in what seems now a distant universe — pre-novel coronavirus pandemic, pre-lockdown — I was crouched next to a monitor as Anna Kendrick and Daniel Dae Kim floated past me and above my head. As I watch, director Joe Penna calls out to the wire technicians to adjust the cables — nearly invisible — that hold Kendrick and Kim dangling in their harnesses, 30 feet in the air. “We’re used to seeing weightlessness in space in a certain way but I think I’ve found a few new takes,” Penna says. “Throughout the film the amount of gravity shifts, from 1 G all the way down to 0 G, or completely weightless. At each stage they’re going to move differently, each stage will look different.” It’s July 12, 2019 and we’re on a soundstage at the MMC Studios in Cologne, Germany. Penna is in the home stretch shooting Stowaway, a space drama he co-wrote with his frequent collaborator, and editor, Ryan Morrison. They had the idea for the movie — a morality play set on a spaceship traveling to Mars — long before coronavirus. But with their story of a small group in isolation, cut off the rest of the world, and worried about the dangers that lurk just outside, the two may have inadvertently made the ultimate film for the pandemic. “It’s stranger than fiction,” says Aram Tertazakian from XYZ Films, which produced Stowaway and, together with CAA Media Finance, is presenting it to buyers at the Virtual Cannes Market this week. “Joe and Ryan didn’t predict the pandemic, but the themes of the movie have a particular resonance right now.” Actually, Joe and Ryan did predict the pandemic. At the Tribeca Film Festival last year they debuted a short web series, Release, about a deadly virus outbreak in the United States. “It was scary how close we got to the real thing,” says Morrison, speaking from his office in Los Angeles on June 10. “I actually had to visit a hospital at the peak of the outbreak and it looked exactly like the sets we designed for Release.” The complete article can be read over at The Hollywood Reporter.
Read posts from the archive:
April 3rd, 2022
December 8th, 2018
July 1st, 2017
