“I’m very quick to say I was standing on the shoulders of a gigantic, amazing true story, and my job was just to serve it, get out of its way.” But translating that true story into a cinematic experience required considerably more than simply recording events.
“I’m most proud of the character work. About being able to tell a breakneck action story that, to me, has deeper character relationships,..”
“What I really saw from the beginning was that I had an opportunity here to make a movie that reminded me of a lot of 1970s crime movies where genre movies were allowed to be character movies.”
“I felt I have to basically do a way more radical movie,”. . .“That’s why I did the movie—to shock the people. Also, to show, like, if you push everybody too far, then you will have kind of a vigilante justice.”
For ZOEY MARTINSON, the shifting relationship between young and old in a Ghanaian fishing village was something worth exploring. Somewhere inside those observations, THE FISHERMAN began to swim. And eventually, naturally, the fish started talking.
“It’s been nine years,” Perkash says of their partnership. “This is the first one we developed from scratch, from the beginning, from zero to realization.” For For Van Acker, that makes ORION “our baby.” And what a baby it is.
“The mantra in these movies has always been that we play it for real time, and after 90 minutes Scott [Adkins] can barely breathe because he’s been through so much. And just the culmination of him doing it twice and entering the third movie was that exact sense of, like, he needs to be absolutely knackered to complete his arc.”
“The more different we are, the more the same we are, and that really comes through beautifully here.”
“One thing I learned is you need to work with people who you really trust. Showing up on set every day is like doing a trust fall every day, and if you hit your head on the concrete once, you don’t believe that they’re going to catch you the next day.”
Pat McKinley and his collaborators found a way to give THE WEIGHT the technical polish its story deserved without polishing away its humanity.
With I HAVE PROOF, JAMES CULLEN BRESSACK, ““really wanted to make something where we’re following a character that believes something so much that he will stop at nothing to try and prove what he believes.”
For PADRAIG REYNOLDS, “It doesn’t matter if it’s an indie budget. The number one thing is safety,” he says.
