About a thousand years ago, filmmaker Joe Carnahan earned a boatload of indie street cred and a Tom Cruise friendship with Narc, a hard-edged, low-budget, economically-brutal police procedural featuring Jason Patric and Ray Liotta doing some of the best work of their respective film careers.
Then he went ahead and got fired from Mission: Impossible III by once-friend Cruise, made the low-budget, highly-stupid, modestly-successful Smokin Aces, which all led to the high-budget, highly-stupid, sort of-fun flop The A-Team. Add to this a burgeoning reputation as someone who’s hard to work with, and the director made the smart move: he returned to his roots.
Finally getting funding for his long-gestating script The Grey (which he co-wrote with Ian Mackenzie Jeffers), a stripped-down tale of an oil-drilling team attempting to survive the Alaskan wilderness, which includes uber-cold temperatures and uber-hungry wolves with a penchant for human flesh. Carnahan smartly loaded his cast with a newly-minted action hero (Neeson), tried-and-true character actors (Dermot Mulroney, Dallas Roberts) and up-and-coming thespians (Joe Anderson, James Badge Dale) to comprise his drilling team.
The Scott Free-produced film is now being shopped and things are going well, thanks to a 30-minute reel that has heads turning. The likes of The Weinstein Company, Summit Entertainment, Warner Bros, along with Open Road, Lionsgate and newcomer FilmDistrict. The asking price is sitting around $8 million with the promise of a 3,000 plus screen opening [Deadline]. Based on this, Warners feel like the best bet for the studio-leaning indie film.
Carnahan and his producers are insisting the film get released later this year, making the turnaround for distributors fast to say the least.
Are you excited to see The Grey? Will this mark Carnahan’s return to quality filmmaking?