There are basically two ways to go as an up-and-coming filmmaker. One possible way to go is to make your debut feature, and use it as a springboard to get access to projects already brewing in the system, so you can keep working, honing your craft and expanding your skillset. The other path is to keep developing your own movies, and hope that your voice is one people will want to invest in, and that’s the one “Welcome To The Punch” (our review) director Eran Creevy is taking. After getting attention for his 2008 effort “Shifty,” he assembled a top shelf cast for ‘Punch’ (James McAvoy and Mark Strong among them). The film is earning accolades, ours own among them, and it appears Creevy now has a number of self-generated options on the table.
First among them is a possible followup for ‘Punch,’ one that would switch out the leading character. “It would definitely be set in Hong Kong. It would be called ‘The Hong Kong Sector‘ and we would find Mark Strong in Hong Kong at the beginning of the movie and there would be a prison break out,” he told The Skinny.
The setting for that film is no coincidence, as Creevy has laid bare this admiration for and inspiration from Asian cinema, which informs a revenge flick he has cooking called “Cry Havoc” which he calls an “homage to ‘The Yellow Sea‘ and ‘I Saw the Devil.’ ” Also on his slate is “Fear of Violence,” which he describes as “about a guy who escapes from prison with only 24-hours to track down and stop a serial killer.” Frankly, those all sound like tantalizing and fascinating potential pictures.
But that doesn’t mean Creevy won’t take calls from Hollywood, and indeed his phone has rung from across the sea, with the director revealing he’s attached to “Autobahn.” Mark Steven Johnson, the director behind “Daredevil” and “Ghost Rider” was previously linked to the movie so this is certainly an upgrade.
“…we will shoot this year or next in Germany, the first six drafts were written by F. Scott Frazier, and I worked on the script with him for a year, and went in and did the last draft of the screenplay,” Creevy told HeyUGuys. “It’s a weird action film – ‘(500) Days of Summer‘ meets ‘Speed‘ – about an American backpacker who gets embroiled with these drug dealers and has to get back across Germany to his girlfriend in Munich. It’s this mad dash and tells their relationship in a Michel Gondry-esque way. Scott came up with these very cool transitions how it goes into their past. It’s a very cut-up narrative about their relationship in a ‘Blue Velvet‘ way.”
So big a pile of options for Creevy, who looks like the next breakout director. See if he’s got the goods when “Welcome To The Punch” opens on March 27th.