EXCLUSIVE: Chris Evans, Anya Taylor-Joy, Salma Hayek, and Brendan Fraser will star in Sacrifice, a film cowritten and to be directed by Romain Gavras. Like his last film Athena that premiered last Venice and was released on Netflix, Sacrifice has a similar combustible and propulsive anarchy coursing through the film. This is closer to satire, but the script by Gavras and Will Arbery was strong enough to compel the leads to commit over the span of four days since the script was sent to talent. More actors will be set shortly, and I expect that the project — CAA Media Finance is selling the world with Rocket Science — won’t have a lot of territories left by the time buyers hit the Croisette. All the elements are there to launch Gavras as a major writer/director, here making his first English language film.
Here is the logline: After a very public breakdown, film star Mike Tyler needs to get back in the spotlight. Tonight is his comeback at a celebrity charity gala on a volcanic island, but he is upstaged when the event is raided by a radical group of warriors led by the zealous Joan. She kidnaps Mike along with the world’s richest man and another person, dragging them across an unforgiving landscape for the sake of a prophecy with apocalyptic stakes: to save humanity by sacrificing three lives. Mike sees a chance at redemption by surviving this role of a lifetime, but Joan will stop at nothing to fulfill her mission.
Taylor-Joy, who’ll be at the Cannes premiere of the George Miller-directed Furiosa playing the title character in the Mad Max: Fury Road prequel, will play the passionate antagonist and Evans will play the movie star she has tapped to die, along with the two others.
Iconoclast’s Robert Wallach will produce with Gavras, Taylor-Joy and Evans. Arbery will be executive producer.
The son of the late filmmaker Costa Gavras (Z and Missing), Gavras has woven into the plot the Greek mythology tales he grew up exposed to by his dad and mom, the French film producer and journalist Michele Ray-Gavras. After cutting his teeth with heralded videos for Jay-Z and Kanye West, M.I.A and Justice, Athena was his third film. Having grown up with a glimpse of fame, he came up with the plot whose jumping off point was the desire to see that balloon of fame punctured.
“It came from a very simple idea, which is every time you go to those events, whether it’s in Cannes, whether it’s a charity event and where you have all those people, the mischievous side of me, and I think the audience as well when they’re watching those events, they kind of want something to go really horribly wrong,” Gavras told Deadline. “When you see glitzy people and all the shininess and all that stuff, you want that moment to be twisted, right? And so every time I’m in those events, I’m like, oh, what if some kids with weapons arrived and hijacked the situation? What would happen? It started from that premise and that mischievous kind of envy of when I find myself in those spaces.
“That evolved into the theme of sacrifice, set in a movie that I mean to be entertaining and a visual delight, and a bit different. The core is thematically, everyone is always talking about changing the world, and without sacrifice the world can’t change. So here we’re taking it very left field, as we have those kids that were born and raised in the woods with a very mystical belief.”
“I was raised myself on Greek mythology,” he said. “Instead of being fed new movies when I was a kid, my parents were telling me these Greek tales, where a mom eats her kids and of sacrifices to volcanoes. Those things fed me and led to the idea of having a group of kids that have a very specific agenda that comes from a very mythological kind of belief system. They need to take three people from that gala and sacrifice them. And I don’t want to say too much because it involves a volcano and involves all that stuff. And so they’re choosing in this space a very famous factor that’s in his comeback moment, along with the richest person in the world and a third person. There is the fondness of satire and Will is amazing at the sharpness of the tone of the characters and the humanity of them. We hope to have a real epic experience of motion picture of cinema. I am so excited by our cast.”
The plan is to shoot the film in the fall.
