The Hunter – trailer
Madman have released the trailer for director Daniel Nettheim’s The Hunter, due for release October 6.
Starring Willem Dafoe, Frances O’Connor and Sam Neill, the film is about a mercenary (Dafoe) who is sent to Tasmania on behalf of a secret international company to hunt the Tasmanian Tiger for it’s paralysing bite to be used in bio-weaponry.
Based on Julia Leigh’s debut novel with a screenplay by Alice Addison, the film is far more humanistic than the above, sci-fi premise.
In in the upcoming October issue of Encore, we spoke with Nettheim and producer Vincent Sheehan of Porchlight Films (Animal Kingdom) about among other things, capturing Willem.
“We managed to get Willem a copy of the script via his manager,” Explains Nettheim. “You never know what you have to do to attract people of that calibre.” Nettheim’s experience, beyond his first and only other feature film Angst eleven years ago, lies in local television drama, but the script was enough for Willem to want to meet with him. In October 2009, Nettheim made a trip to New York. “I got a call on the last day of my stay saying Willem would like to meet me for lunch. They suggested I see his latest film which was in the cinemas, so I went to see Antichrist before meeting him – fortunately it didn’t come up. He was very friendly and inviting and we had a chat about many things. I wasn’t there to pitch the project but for him to meet me and see if we were on the same wavelength.”
