Indie thriller The Island, featuring Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara, is once again looking like it might come unstuck at the end of a turbulent year for filmmakers.
One of the first victims of this year’s strikes was Pawel Pawlikowski’s next planned film, The Island.
The Cold War director had assembled real-life husband and wife duo Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara to play the leads in the film, not to mention all of the financing too.
Cast and crew had assembled on the titular island all ready to shoot… and then the writers’ strike hit. While that shouldn’t have prevented the film from shooting, fears (that would prove to be well founded) that an actors’ strike would soon follow spooked the bond company insuring the project, and everything fell apart on the eve of production.
That was in May, but by September reports surfaced that Pawlikowski had refused to abandon the film and that perhaps, post-strike, it might be back on with shooting set to take place in Fuerteventura, Spain just as soon as the actors’ strike ended.
Of course, these plans were all subject to the post-strike schedules of both Mara and Phoenix, with the latter especially busy with a slew of high-profile projects such as Eddington, the next film by Ari Aster, not to mention an untitled Todd Haynes film and press commitments for Joker: Folie a Deux.
The Film Stage (via World of Reel) managed to catch up with Lukasz Zal, the project’s cinematographer, who reflected on the shutdown back in May, saying:
“It was just two-and-a-half weeks before shooting. And then, you know, we lost a lot of money because our production designer built a lot of roads because everything was very hard-to-access terrain.
So he built little roads, gates, bridges. So that’s a huge amount of people working on that. And then on a Friday the co-production called and said, ‘We have to stop immediately’.
They lost so much money and now we don’t have this money, basically. It’s a black-and-white film as well, so it’ll be hard to find this money now. It’s terrible because it’s an amazing story, a beautiful script.”
It’s a real shame that in a series of strikes intended to impact studios, such a promising independent project has been impacted. Hopefully all involved can still find a way to get things up and running at some point but it’s looking increasingly unlikely.
We’ll leave you with the project’s synopsis below, and it may well be that this tantalising setup is as much as we’ll ever see of The Island:
‘A couple who decide to move away from civilisation and build a private residence on a remote island. However, a millionaire passing through the island reveals their plans to the world, making the couple a sensation. When a European countess gets to know about the island, she plans to take over the same. This countess and her entourage soon begin to threaten the Eden that the couple has built and battle lines are quickly drawn. Psychological warfare ensues as seduction and jealousy descend into sexual infidelity, betrayal, and eventually murder.’
