The Order and Nitram director could be about to team up with Sebastian Stan on the true-life thriller, Burning Rainbow Farm.
Even if the ongoing awards season seems determined to ignore it, Sebastian Stan enjoyed a wonderful 2024, not only appearing in two excellent films but putting in career-best work in both of them. In A24’s A Different Man, Stan showcased his excellent taste for choosing roles which challenge him as an actor whilst also pointing to his inclinations for seeking out and developing roles that some of his contemporaries would fear to take.
That approach was certainly true when it came to his other role last year, taking on the part of a younger Donald Trump in The Apprentice. As with A Different Man, Stan took a role in an election year that – given the febrile state of America’s political landscape – was sure to be divisive and gave us a fantastic performance which contributed to an absorbing film.
The actor’s stock is high at the moment, as is that of Justin Kurzel, whose gritty cop drama, The Order picked up excellent reviews at the back end of last year, including one from us. According to World Of Reel, Stan reached out to Kurzel and asked him to helm one of the projects he is currently attached to, Burning Rainbow Farm.
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The film is based the non-fiction book of the same name by author Dean Kuipers, and is about an FBI raid on a ranch owned by a pair of marijuana advocates. The real-life incident occurred just days before 9/11 shook the foundations of American society. It’s a story that has one or two parallels with The Order, given that the latter’s also a fact-based piece about an FBI investigation – in The Order’s case, that of white supremacist group connected to a string of heists, bombings and assassinations in the Pacific Northwest. It’s a terrific film.
Burning Rainbow Farm, meanwhile, isn’t Kurzel’s only film in the works. He also has Mice, a horror thriller starring Nicole Kidman. Adapted from a novel by Gordon Reece (the writer of several Kurzel film screenplays), it’s about a mother and daughter who experience something grim in a remote cottage. We’ll have to see which of these happens first.
Room’s Lenny Abrahamson was originally set to be directing Burning Rainbow Farm, and it’s unclear why he departed. Stan has the Marvel Cinematic Universe film, Thunderbolts* coming this year, as well as a Romanian drama, Blue Banks, helmed by Andreea Cristina Bortun. We’ll bring you more on Burning Rainbow Farm as we hear it.
Read more: The Order, and why great modern thrillers are still being made outside the Hollywood system