(Almost) ready to roll Pandemic-delayed film and TV projects, including a Netflix sci-fi series and a major horror movie, adjust to new schedule By: Randall King  Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Monday, Jun. 8, 2020

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/06/2020 (1565 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If cameras are not yet rolling, the film/TV industry is definitely heating up as production has been given the go-ahead from the provincial government. But at this stage, a little more than a week after the Phase 2 marker on June 1, it’s difficult to nail down what is in pre-production and what will be going to camera in the coming weeks. 

Here’s what we do know:

• A prequel to the thriller Orphan is in the works. It’s the one project firmly scheduled to shoot here, in August and September. Titled Esther, it explores the back story of the titular killer, who (spoiler alert!) was an adult passing herself off as a child to wreak havoc on the lives of the couple who adopted her in the hit 2009 horror film. The prequel reportedly shows how Esther made her way from a Russian orphanage to the U.S. The film is to be directed by William Brent Bell, who directed The Boy and Brahms: The Boy II in British Columbia. (Orphan was shot in and around Toronto.)

• Director Brad Anderson (The Machinist), who shot the Netflix thriller Fractured here a couple of years back, will be returning to helm a new horror film, a theatrical feature titled Blood. 

• The first season of a new sci-fi Netflix series, currently titled Sentient, is in preparation. 

• Buffalo Gal Pictures is preparing work on two feature films, one of which is a Canada/U.K. co-production.

• • •

Esther was in the works prior to the pandemic shutdown, which means, like a select few of the films going ahead, it was already insured, explains Kyle Irving of Eagle Vision, the local production company for the film. That makes producing the film easier, because it can still use its insurance against the risk that a return of the pandemic could halt production.

It was to film this spring, but will now commence shooting in August, Irving says, adding the extra time will be needed to train the crew for working under the COVID-19 restrictions as set out by the industry.

“June will be for training, July will be for (pre-production) and we’ll start shooting in August,” Irving says. Both the pre-production and the shoot will be six-week periods. No cast has been announced. 

• • •

Also postponed in mid-March was the Netflix TV series tentatively titled Sentient. It had been scheduled to begin shooting April 30 and continue to the end of July. Local producer Ellen Rutter is working on remounting that series, set in the not-so-distant future.

“We had started pre-production when COVID made us shut down just like everybody else,” Rutter says. “We’ll be back as soon as possible but we don’t have dates yet.

“We will be shooting almost exclusively in Winnipeg, maybe parts of Selkirk, but we haven’t gone far enough along to determine where all of our locations would be,” the industry veteran adds. “It’s a nine-episode series, so that’s a good two or three months of work for the shooting crew.

“We will rethink how we schedule. It will remain mostly the same, I think,” she says of moving from a spring-summer shoot to a possible summer-fall shoot. “We may have to accommodate for the weather, I suppose.”

• • •

Buffalo Gal Pictures producer Phyllis Laing says the company is at work on two different feature films, but she is not at liberty to go in detail on either. One, a Canada/U.K. co-production, is in “preliminary prep” she says.

“We had a project that we were to go into prep on March 16 and we stood it down on March 12,” Laing says. “We sent our staff home on the 13th. And that’s the one that will be we will be bringing back.

“It’s a feature film with a company in the U.K. and will have a limited number of people — we have about five people in total that we need to bring in and quarantine,” Laing says. “We’ll be shooting in August.”

Part of the appeal of relaunching the project is that it does not require much interaction with too many people in front of the camera.

“It’s definitely a contained film and it would be a good one for what we need to be doing to keep everyone safe,” Laing says.

Laing says the other film came to Buffalo Gal as a direct result of Manitoba’s minimal COVID numbers.

“We started thinking about the types of things that would be nice to do and when it came to us, we thought it would be particularly interesting,” she says. “Because 90 per cent of it could be shot outside.”

• • •

Fractured, the mind-bending 2019 Netflix film directed by Brad Anderson and starring Sam Worthington (Avatar), was shot in Manitoba in the winter of 2018-19. It was notable for the way it relied on a supporting cast of Winnipeg actors to portray the maddeningly ambiguous medical staff of a rural hospital where Worthington’s wife and daughter go missing.

Anderson evidently liked the experience well enough to return to the city to shoot a new horror feature film, titled Blood.

“Brad Anderson wants to come back and he wants me to hire all-local crew,” says Kyle Bornais of Farpoint Films. “He was very happy with the crew and he’s really excited about coming back.”

Again, not much can be said about the project, except it too will require stars to come from out of province and out of the country.

“Right now, it’s a 33-day shoot, so it’s a nice project to bring to Manitoba,” Bornais says. “It will mostly be shot rurally. Hopefully he can start scouting here in early July.

“It looks like we probably won’t be able to shoot until the end of August or maybe September, based on the fact that I’ll have to deal with quarantining,” Bornais says.

In the interim, Farpoint will be busy with other, smaller projects, including the true crime series Dying to Be Famous: The Ryan Singleton Mystery, which consists of six one-hour episodes investigating the presumed murder of an aspiring model found dead in the Mojave Desert, with many of his internal organs missing. Bornais says they expect to shoot dramatic recreations for the series in the next few weeks.

“I want to test production with the smaller projects and work our way up to bigger things,” he says.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing

Randall King
Reporter

In a way, Randall King was born into the entertainment beat.

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