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Breath
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| Deedee |
Date: Sunday, 20-Mar-16, 8:53 PM | Message # 196 |
 Bee's Knees
Messages: 704
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Nice to hear from you Emmy and welcome to our site. |
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| kim |
Date: Monday, 21-Mar-16, 3:29 AM | Message # 197 |
 Bee's Knees
Messages: 676
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Emmy- Glad you found your way to the site. Welcome and share the excitement about Simon and Breath. |
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| Ivana |
Date: Monday, 21-Mar-16, 5:50 AM | Message # 198 |
 Fair Dinkum
Messages: 1223
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Welcome Emmy  |
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| emmyderidder |
Date: Monday, 21-Mar-16, 10:47 AM | Message # 199 |
Dinkie-Di
Messages: 178
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Thank you so much Deedee,Kim and Ivana |
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| Ivana |
Date: Wednesday, 23-Mar-16, 10:58 PM | Message # 200 |
Fair Dinkum
Messages: 1223
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Producer Mark Johnson Talks Crazy Workloads, The Primacy Of Writers And Cable TV
Hollywood producer Mark Johnson is juggling two movies and two TV series which are literally worlds apart. While the Oscar and dual Emmy winner may well be envied by his peers, he just wishes he were not so frantically busy.
Johnson is in Perth, the Western Australian capital, collaborating with Simon Baker and Aussie producer Jamie Hilton in pre-production on Breath, a feature film based on Australian author Tim Winton’s novel which marks Baker’s debut as a feature director.
The sound mix of the final episode of season two of AMC’s Better Call Saul, on which Johnson serves as an executive producer, has just finished. Shut Eye, a Hulu series which his Gran Via Productions is producing with creator Les Bohem and TriStar Television, started shooting in Vancouver last Monday. He’s producing Downsizing, Alexander Payne’s comedy-drama for Paramount Pictures, which stars Matt Damon, Reese Witherspoon, Christoph Waltz, Neil Patrick Harris, Alex Baldwin and Hong Chau and rolls on April 1.
Many producers would kill for such a workload but the reality is a little different. “My goal is to get as involved as I possibly can on each project,” he told Forbes on the line from Perth. “I am not thrilled about the fact that so much is happening at the same time. I feel I am diluting myself and while I am not so arrogant as to believe my direct involvement is going to make everything so much better I want to be able to have a say in everything we do. Right now I feel I am pulled in a number of different directions.”
An Oscar winner for Rain Man and dual Emmy recipient for Breaking Bad, Johnson is among the producers who are adept at making films and TV shows for a variety of networks and platforms. “In an ideal world you are making shows for everybody because they all have different requirements,” he said. “I like making small independent films as well as big commercial films. What is going on in cable television right now is just extraordinary . Every major movie maker I have worked with recently is involved in one form or other with television and that’s where they see real artistic freedom.” In commercial terms, Johnson observed, “In upfront money cable is not nearly as strong as the [broadcast] networks but if a show is a success it can balance out.”
Breath is scripted by Winton, Peter Duncan and Gerard Lee (who co-wrote the BBC/SundanceTV miniseries Top of the Lake with Jane Campion) and centers on two thrills-seeking 16-year-old boys who form an unlikely bond with reclusive older surfer Sando (Baker) and his enigmatic wife. The boys are driven to take risks that will have a profound and lasting impact on their lives.
The casting of the teenage protagonists (both fresh faces) and key support roles is being finalized. Although there have been a number of international pre-sales Johnson observed, “There is a lot of the world still to be sold. While this is a uniquely Australian story its themes are universal. I am setting out to make a great film, not a great Australian film.”
Johnson met The Mentalist star years ago through Baker’s wife, actress Rebecca Rigg, when she worked on the producer’s short-lived TV series L.A. Doctors. Subsequently Baker and Johnson collaborated on the series The Guardian. He discovered Winton’s novel when he was producing The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark back-to-back in Australia.
“I fell in love with the book and wanted to make a film, but I did not want to make it as an American, as the only non-Australian involved,” he said. “So I decided to give the book to Simon who knew of it but had not read it. He loved it so I brought him in as a producer with me and we started developing the script. At the same moment we decided the perfect person to direct it is Simon himself.”
The Sydney-based Jamie Hilton joined the project and they raised the funding from Screen Australia, ScreenWest, the WA government’s royalties for regions program, the 40% producer offset, Canadian investor Autumn Films and Australian distributor Palace Films.
In Perth on Wednesday the producer gave a master-class arranged by ScreenWest. His key message: “For a producer it all comes down to the writing. You have to read constantly, you have to befriend the best writers and convince them you are the person who can best protect their material. You can be the most inspired producer but if you don’t have the right scripts, the material that people want to make, you are really not going to go anywhere. Read everything you can and try to find an upcoming writer and befriend him or her and make yourself indispensable to him or her.”
As for his other projects, Downsizing stars Damon as an Omaha man who joins a group of people who undergo a new process to shrink themselves so they can live in one of the many miniature communities that are sprouting up around the world. Payne co-wrote the screenplay with Jim Taylor and is producing with Johnson.
Shut Eye takes a darkly comedic look at the underground world of Los Angeles storefront psychics and the organized crime syndicate that runs them. The cast includes Angus Sampson (Fargo, Insidious Chapter 3), KaDee Strickland and Isabella Rossellini.
Also on his slate is The Parts You Lose, an independent film starring Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul and Game of Thrones’ Carice van Houten. Written by Darren Lemke (Goosebumps, Jack the Giant Slayer), the suspense drama follows a young hearing-impaired boy who forms an unlikely friendship with an injured and potentially dangerous fugitive in his small North Dakota town. Dutch director Paula van der Oest is attached and Johnson will produce with Tom Williams WMB -7.77% and Netherlands-based NL Film.
http://www.forbes.com/sites....947735a
source: https://twitter.com/grovesdj |
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| Ivana |
Date: Thursday, 24-Mar-16, 5:48 AM | Message # 201 |
Fair Dinkum
Messages: 1223
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Breath producer on Simon Baker tears and Tim Winton's "extraordinary" book
American producer Mark Johnson has landed in WA and is in the thick of pre-production on the film adaptation of Tim Winton's Breath, to be directed by Simon Baker.
"I've now done three films in Australia - one on the Gold Coast, one in Cairns and one in Melbourne, but I'd never been to Western Australia, and I actually got to know it through the works of Tim Winton", Johnson said.
"Winton describes it with such love and respect and is so protective of the land that I felt like I had already known it".
The vast majority of the shoot will take place in the coastal town of Denmark, which Johnson is "in awe of", and the producer is already excited about the communal atmosphere.
"I have to say, and it's been a long time since I've experienced this - the entire town is behind this film. The man in the street as well as on the municipal level".
Johnson, whose credits range from Rain Man to Breaking Bad, latched on to Winton's book years ago while he was in Melbourne making Don't Be Afraid of the Dark with producer Guillermo del Toro.
"I was aware of the book. I knew of Tim Winton but really hadn't read him. Hollywood has been trying to make one of his books, Dirt Music, for some time. At one point I think Heath Ledger was going to do it".
"Somebody had told me about Breath and I was in Melbourne and I saw a streetcar go by with an ad on it for the book. I thought: now I have to read it. And I fell in love with it".
"I tracked Tim down and ironically first met him in Portland, Oregon, where he was on a book tour, and he was nice enough to grant me an option on the book. I was developing it, and I thought - I'm being very arrogant in assuming that I can tell a uniquely Australian story".
"I had done this television show [called] The Guardian with Simon Baker. I gave it to him as a producer, and then we started developing it together. He had been wanting to direct, and he read this and so identified with so much of it. There was a Sando character [an older surfer to be played by Baker in the film] in his life. I gave it to him on a Friday and he finished it on Sunday, and he told me that when he put the book down he just sat down and had a little cry".
This may be the feature directorial debut of Lennox Head-native Baker, but it doesn't feel like it, says the producer.
"I don't see him as a first timer. He's been around some major feature directors, be it Curtis Hanson (LA Confidential) or Ang Lee (Ride with the Devil), and he's been doing hundreds of hours of TV. And he started directing a number of those [Mentalist] episodes, which I saw".
Baker has been careful about his choices since breaking out with that show, acting in only two features in the last five years.
"He's one of those actors who doesn't sit around and go to his camper between set-ups. He's on the set, he's asking questions. He's as prepared as just about any director I've been around".
Johnson and co-producer Jamie Hilton, who met on the Gold Coast set of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010), enlisted first Winton himself and then Top of the Lake's Gerard Lee to have a crack at the screenplay.
"Tim did the first adaptation, and did a very good job", said Johnson.
"It's interesting. I have the book on such a pedestal that I actually thought when I read Tim's screenplay that Tim Winton the screenwriter has done an injustice to Tim Winton the novelist. But it was kind of inevitable; you can't include everything. I thought that he had made some decisions on [omitting] some key moments and characters that I thought needed to be in there".
"Gerard Lee was fantastic and somebody I think the world of. We had some very good writers but it's not one of those books that becomes a movie. You have to make some very important decisions and hopefully - we'll see - most of our audience will say they made the right decisions. It was a tricky one. It took several years to get the script right".
Financing also took time, with Johnson emphasising that he's been "so impressed with the Australian art councils and the support we've gotten, from Screen Australia to ScreenWest".
Alleviating the pressure to enlist big names is the fact that "our two stars are Tim Winton and Simon Baker", said Johnson.
The two lead roles in Breath are sixteen year-old friends 'Loonie' and 'Pikelet'.
"There are some big names we haven't announced yet, but at the core of it are these two boys, who obviously had to be able to act but also had to be surfers. That's not something you can really fake".
"I remember years ago I did an American baseball movie called The Natural, and we had a very good casting director who kept on bringing actors in who were good but couldn't even play baseball. So we said let's reverse the process and bring in baseball players and then find out which ones can act".
"That's what we did here too. I think there's a very healthy disrespect of authority and authority figures in the Australian culture, and that's what we wanted these boys to have. Simon saw hundreds of boys".
Shooting dates and the full cast will be announced "any day now", said Johnson, who is determined to do justice to Winton's novel by making "not just an exceptional Australian movie, but an exceptional movie, period".
"It's so hard to make a good film. It has to be a good film. I think my number one goal is for Tim Winton to take a look at it and think that we've done justice to his extraordinary book".
"It's got universal themes - about being desperately afraid that you're ordinary, about being afraid as a young man that there's nothing exceptional about you - and I think that has great application in a universal way, but this is also a specifically Western Australian story".
http://if.com.au/2016....PW.html |
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| Ivana |
Date: Thursday, 24-Mar-16, 6:54 AM | Message # 202 |
Fair Dinkum
Messages: 1223
Status: Offline |
Mark Johnson: the Hollywood producer who fell in love with a Tim Winton novel
Hollywood producer Mark Johnson, who won an Oscar for Rain Man and two Emmys for Breaking Bad, was shooting a Katie Holmes horror movie in Melbourne when he saw a passing ad for Tim Winton's novel Breath.
Seven years on, the filmmaker whose impressive credits also include Good Morning Vietnam, The Notebook, The Chronicles of Narnia movies and Better Call Saul, is about to produce a film version of the widely admired novel with Simon Baker as director.
The Mentalist star will also play a reclusive surfer who, with his mysterious wife, forms an unlikely bond with two teenage boys in the 1970s.
Filming on the country's latest Winton adaptation – joining Cloudstreet and Lockie Leonard on TV and In The Winter Dark, That Eye, The Sky and The Turning in cinemas – is due to start around Denmark in Western Australia in two weeks.
"Somebody had told me about the book and they told me how much I'd like it," Johnson says from Perth on his way to a masterclass for ScreenWest. "I was walking downtown [while shooting Don't Be Afraid of the Dark in Melbourne] and saw a bus drive by – it may have been a streetcar now that I think about it – with a big billboard on it advertising the book.
"I said, 'Oh my god, I've got to read that' and I instantly fell in love with it."
Johnson recognised Breath was ideal material for a film.
"Its themes were universal yet for me it was such a specific Australian story," he says. "Tim Winton fabricated this town – this life – in Western Australia that sounded both romantic and sparse.
"These boys were experiencing what young boys do – their rebellion and their rejection of their parents, specifically their father. All of this completely appealed to me."
Back in the states, Johnson met Winton while he was on a book tour in Oregon and optioned the novel.
He gave a copy to Baker, a friend since they worked together on the TV series The Guardian, with a view to producing it together.
"I had a pact with myself that I'd be the only non-Australian involved with the film," Johnson says. "So I thought, alright, who can help me make this movie and honour the Australian nature of it?"
But Baker wanted to do more than just co-produce Breath; he wanted to direct it and play one of the key roles.
Two unknown actors – yet to be announced – will play the lead roles.
Johnson is confident Baker will excel as a director.
"Simon's been around some very good film directors – Curtis Hanson [on LA Confidential] and Ang Lee [on Ride With The Devil] and people like that," he says. "Obviously he knows the television world really well.
"I think it's very important to him that the film be as honest as possible and embrace the themes have been important to Tim Winton."
Baker is determined that Breath not be a Hollywood film.
We all know what that means," Johnson says. "He wants it to be honest and, as a film, he doesn't want it to overstay its emotional welcome.
"He knows what he wants and he wants these two boys – and the film will really succeed based on the performances of these two boys – not to be cute or cloying child actors.
"He wants them to be as honest as can be. This is where we're really going to benefit from him being an actor.
"I think he's going to just tell these boys relax and forget about the cameras and all those other people who are staring in front of you and have some fun."
Baker has previously said he expects Breath to be a tough shoot – "fraught with difficulties" is his phrase.
"Shooting outside, you're totally at the mercy of the weather anyway but with surfing you also have the swell, the wind direction, the light ... It's a nightmare."
Simon Baker ... directing Breath. Photo: James Alcock
http://www.watoday.com.au/enterta....ig.html |
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| bee |
Date: Thursday, 24-Mar-16, 11:42 AM | Message # 203 |
 Fair Dinkum
Messages: 1525
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Thanks for 3 great articles Ivana. It's good to know that Simon has a great team behind him who have such a wealth of experience as this project means so much to him (and us)! So excited and happy for him!  |
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| DS_Pallas |
Date: Thursday, 24-Mar-16, 2:08 PM | Message # 204 |
 Fair Dinkum
Messages: 1979
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Yeah, was thinking the same, Bee. Seems he has a strong and faithfull team with him. |
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| emmyderidder |
Date: Thursday, 24-Mar-16, 5:07 PM | Message # 205 |
Dinkie-Di
Messages: 178
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Thank you for the articles Ivana.I hope Simon will have a great time and feel oke making BREATH and acting of course!!!!!! |
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| kim |
Date: Friday, 25-Mar-16, 3:51 AM | Message # 206 |
Bee's Knees
Messages: 676
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Ivana- thanks for getting those articles posted! You are so efficient. It's fun to see all the press about Breath, can't wait really. I hope that Simon will give us a few instagrams along the way. |
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| DS_Pallas |
Date: Friday, 25-Mar-16, 12:24 PM | Message # 207 |
Fair Dinkum
Messages: 1979
Status: Offline |
Quote kim (  ) I hope that Simon will give us a few instagrams along the way.
Yes, and if he's too busy, I hope he'll get a PR person keen on social media, so we can have a few insights during the shooting. |
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| tanjaontour |
Date: Friday, 25-Mar-16, 5:15 PM | Message # 208 |
 Jillaroo
Messages: 61
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Thank you Ivana for all posts!! I apreciate it much. I was very busy lately and now just exhausted.
I miss Simon on IG too! Hope we'll see from him something soon. |
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| Deedee |
Date: Friday, 25-Mar-16, 7:04 PM | Message # 209 |
Bee's Knees
Messages: 704
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Thanks for posting these articles Ivana. Sounds like he has a great team with him. Only two more weeks before filming starts. Do hope we have updates on Instagram from Simon despite the fact he will be so busy. |
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| emmyderidder |
Date: Friday, 25-Mar-16, 7:44 PM | Message # 210 |
Dinkie-Di
Messages: 178
Status: Offline |
Sorry I still don't understand how to answer you,it is not like Facebook please someone help me please |
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