While we all know James Gunn from his days with Troma, and being the writer of Dawn of the Dead and writer/director of SLiTHER, Gunn has become A-list with his Marvel masterpiece, Guardians of the Galaxy. But that hasn’t stopped him from dabbling in our genre.
Gunn took to Facebook to announce that they’ve commencing production on a new film penned by Gunn, The Belco Experiment, which will be directed by Wolf Creek‘s Greg McLean!
“The story revolves around the American Belco company in South America which is mysteriously sealed off at the beginning of a work day,” explains Gunn, “and its employees are ordered to kill each other or be killed themselves. This starts an escalation of violence, where we discover the true nature of each and every Belco employee.”
It will be produced by Gunn, and Peter Safran, who produced Annabelle and The Conjuring. MGM will be financing.
The film is currently in pre-production and will be shooting in Bogota, Colombia in early June of this year.
Here’s more from Gunn:
“I cannot tell you how passionate and excited I am about this project! It’s a script I wrote a few years ago, for which I have always had a deep love. Believe it or not, it’s a film that first came to me in a dream, and I woke up and wrote the first draft in a two-week fugue state binge. One of the first people to ever read the script, Jonathan Glickman, carried it around with him for years until becoming President of MGM, when he approached Peter Safran and I about financing it. I was all for it, providing two things: 1) Although it has the heart and humor my films have all had, it is also the most intense and uncompromising script I’ve ever written. It would need to stay true to that. 2) I’d only do it if we found the right director – which, in some ways, I thought was unlikely.
Jon promised we’d make the film with full integrity – and, so far, MGM has – awesomely – been true to their word. And, after a long, concentrated search for a director we came to Greg McLean. Greg shares my philosophy about honesty in film, and his naturalistic style lends itself to Belco. The past few weeks we’ve spent working together have been a joy – I don’t know if I’ve ever related to another filmmaker’s sense of aesthetics and love of film more.