EXCLUSIVE: Michael Shannon is set to make his directorial debut with Eric Larue, a movie based on Brett Nephew piece that debuted in 2002 at A Red Orchid Theater in Chicago, of which Shannon is a founding member. Neveu also adapts the script.
The film was to shoot in Arkansas. But since the Supreme Court reversal of Roe vs. Wade Triggered that state’s 2019 Law 180, which bans nearly all abortions, including cases of rape and incest, the filmmakers have pulled out of Arkansas and will now shoot in and around Wilmington, Carolina North.
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For Nephew, Eric Larue‘s origin as a play was in response to the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado. The piece premiered in 2002 at the Red Orchid. Anearly 15 years after her debut, Shannon was directing the play Traitor – which is a new story by Nephew An enemy of the people — when a gunman opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. These shoots led to Neveu adapting his original play into the feature film which Shannon will direct.
The film follows Janice, Eric’s 17-year-old mother, who shot and killed three of her classmates. As Janice faces a reunion of the other boys’ mothers and a long-delayed visit to her son in prison, the story is not about violence but about what we choose to think and do to survive a trauma.
“Eric Larue has so much to say about our country, about how we try (sometimes quite awkwardly) to deal with the trauma of living here, which is so insidious because it doesn’t come openly in concrete terms most of the time” , Shannon said. . “Like most great stories, Eric Larue plays simultaneously at macro level and micro level. When I read the script, I immediately knew I had to direct it. I saw it. I heard it. I could feel it. And I wanted to make sure he got the right touch in every aspect, because at the end of the day, it’s an extraordinarily delicate thing.
“I find it interesting,” he added, “to align with artists who possess the most vivid imaginations, the strictest but most empathetic senses of morality, and the most passionate and rigorous disciplines to to create worlds and stories that contribute to our experience and understanding of what it is to be a human being today and, in particular, in this country.
The pic will be produced by Sarah Green of Brace Cove Productions, Karl Hartman of Big Indie Pictures and Jina Panebianco of CaliWood Pictures. Jeff Nichols, R. Wesley Sierk III, Byron Wetzel, Meghan Schumacher, Joh D. Straley and Declan Baldwin will serve as executive producers. This will be the seventh film Shannon, Nichols and Green have worked on.
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On the side of the actors, Shannon will next be seen in High-speed train facing Brad Pitt too George and Tammy opposite Jessica Chastain. It also amsterdam coming.
Neveu is replaced by Meghan Schumacher Management and Lichter Grossman Nichols. He recently wrote and produced the feature film Late night for Frisson.
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