26/07/2005

Begun on the 25th of April in Toronto, shooting on Silent Hill [+see also:
trailer
film profile] by Christophe Gans finished last week in Canada. The superproduction adapted from a cult horror video game (4 million sold worlwide) goes into post-production and into the hands of the virtuoso Parisian special effect experts at BUF Compagnie who are currently working on Arthur by Luc Besson. A French production driven by Davis Films of Samuel Hadida who has already been involved in two features by Christophe Gans (Crying Freeman in 1995 and Brotherhood of the Wolf in 2001), Silent Hill has a Canadian co-production as part of a total budget of 42 million euros. Announcing itself as a major film for 2006, the film will be released in the USA in March 2006 and distributed in France by Metropolitan Filmexport, another company of the brothers Samuel and Victor Hadida, hoping too to be in the frame for the Cannes festival.

Adapted by a trio composed of Christophe Gans, French director Nicolas Boukhrief (Le Convoyeur) and American Roger Avery (Killing Zoé, Les Lois de l’attraction), Silent Hill brings together a cast including Radha Mitchell, Laurie Holden, Sean Bean and Deborah Kara Unger. With the Dane Dan Laustsen as director of photography, the film retraces the story of a young woman who cannot stop dreaming of a town called Silent Hill to the point of wanting to run away to visit it, so the mother decides to go with her. The two characters find themselves in another reality, destablising and terrifying, peopled by strange creatures and governed by a darkness that changes everything it touches. A universe described by Christophe Gans as "revolutionary, with a fascinating atmosphere, a terrifying and intelligent game".