Luke Evans to star in 'Three Seconds'
Luke Evans (“The Hobbit”) will star in “Three Seconds,” a maximum-security prison thriller from producer Basil Iwanyk (“John Wick”), directed by Otto Bathurst, and sold by Alex Walton’s Bloom.
Bloom has already announced sales rights at Berlin on “Jadotville,” a true event Congo-set battle actioner with Jamie Dornan (“Fifty Shades of Grey”) and France’s Guillame Canet (“Last Night”). At a 2015 Berlin market with just a small number of high-profile new action/thriller movies available, “Three Seconds” and “Jadotville” are already being talked up by buyers as very attractive.
On “Three Seconds,” Iwanyk’s Thunder Road and Ollie Madden of Shine Pictures are producing with Kevin Frakes and Raj Singh of PalmStar Media providing financing. Erica Lee is executive producing.
Principal photography is set to begin this Spring in New York.
Written by Matt Cook, “Three Seconds” is an adaptation of a best-selling novel by Scandi writing duo Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom, hailed as new Swedish crime masters.
It turns on a man who is dispatched by the FBI to infiltrate the Polish mafia’s New York drug trade. Forced undercover in maximum security prison when his cover’s sprung and he’s abandoned by the FBI, his only chance of survival is to break out of the prison or die.
“We are looking forward to presenting this fun and fast paced script to buyers in Berlin,” said Walton. “It’s a great package: An immensely commercial project with a talented and seasoned team between Otto, Basil and Kevin.”
Gone are the days when straight-arrow generic fare racked up reliable sales in international. “Audiences are looking for something different,” Walton said in the run-up to this year’s EFM.
That edge on “Three Seconds” should come from Brit director Bathurst, renowned in Britain for his critically acclaimed Netflix/Tiger Aspect series “Peaky Blinders,” a BAFTA Television Craft Award winner, the “Black Mirror” series, and the BBC original miniseries “Criminal Justice,” which took a 2009 BAFTA Best Drama Serial TV Award.
Bathurst and Evans are both represented by WME.
http://variety.com/2015/film/news/berlin-luke-evans-stars-in-basil-iwa nyk-produced-three-seconds-sold-by-bloom-1201423328/