Busy film-production season brings Hollywood stars to city

A few movie stars and a handful of up-and-coming directors will be spending time in Winnipeg over the next several months for what is turning out to be the busiest film-production season ever.

First up to shoot later this month is the adaptation of Stephen King’s novella the The Long Walk, under the direction of Francis Lawrence (The Hunger Games).

The story, written by King under the nom de plume Richard Bachman, tells of a grim, futuristic competition in which a large group of boys endure a forced death march until only one is left standing.

The film has reportedly signed Cooper Hoffman (of the Paul Thomas Anderson film Licorice Pizza) and British actor David Johnson (the HBO series Industry).

For locals, the casting of Hoffman may be especially poignant: his father, Philip Seymour Hoffman, shot the film Capote here 20 years ago in 2004 and went on to earn a Best Actor Oscar for his work as the flamboyant writer Truman Capote.

The Long Walk is scheduled to wrap in mid-September.

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The Nick Cassavetes film Bruno Penguin and the Staten Island Princess, which had a production office in Winnipeg for a few months this year, is apparently proceeding, although production here seems to have shut down.

One possible reason is that the film had to go on a period of hiatus while shooting could take place in the Antarctic. (It would reportedly be the first Hollywood production to shoot on location in that part of the world.)

According to a story in Deadline, production will begin in November with Shia LaBeouf in talks for a role in the film.

If the film does return here, it may bring along Oscar winner Sir Anthony Hopkins, 86, who has signed on to play art agent Ben Windsor.

Scripted by Daniel Barnz and Ned Zeman, the film is based on Zeman’s Vanity Fair article about Swiss photographer Bruno Zehnder, who spent the last 20 years of his life in Antarctica photographing Emperor penguins. (So great was Zehnder’s obsession, he legally changed his name to Bruno Penguin.)

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Another film scheduled to shoot this fall is It Takes Two, an action-comedy written and directed by BenDavid Grabinski, co-creator (with Bryan Lee O’Malley) and showrunner of the animated Netflix series Scott Pilgrim Takes Off.

The film, formerly titled Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice, is described as a buddy action comedy set in the criminal underworld.

On his Instagram account, Grabinski confirmed a Deadline story stating that the film will star Vince Vaughn (Wedding Crashers, Swingers) and James Marsden (X-Men, Enchanted).

Production is scheduled to commence in September and run through to November. It will share production time with hot director Egor Abramenko’s A24-produced horror thriller Altar, which is scheduled to shoot from mid-August to October.

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Nobody 2, the sequel to the locally shot 2021 Netflix hit, has not announced any new cast beyond returning stars Bob Odenkirk and Connie Nielsen as married couple Hutch and Becca Mansell.

But it has announced a new director, taking over from Russian filmmaker Ilya Naishuller. Indonesian director Timo Tjahjanto is known for the breakneck film The Night Comes For Us, currently on Netflix. His presence will presumably up the sequel’s action ante even more, especially if rumours of casting the awesome The Night Comes for Us/The Raid star Iko Uwais prove to be true.

Production is scheduled from August to September, presumably circumventing the issue with colder winter temperatures that often made the first film uncomfortable for the visiting actors.

Coupled with the recently wrapped action-comedy With Love, starring Oscar winners Ke Huy Kwan (Everything Everywhere All at Once) and Ariana DeBose (West Side Story), the making of Nobody 2 is a sign the action-centric production company 87North is active in Manitoba.

Indeed, that relationship may yield a trifecta with the rumoured upcoming production of a sequel to the 2022 action-comedy Violent Night, presumably meaning the return of David Harbour as a kindly but unsaintly Santa Claus.

randall.king.arts@gmail.com