Altitude Film Sales has boarded SHE WHO BRINGS GIFTS, one of last year’s Brit List selected screenplays, adapted by acclaimed novelist M. R. Carey from his best-selling novel “The Girl with all the Gifts”.
Director Colm McCarthy lauded helmer of hit British TV shows including Peaky Blinders starring Cillian Murphy and Tom Hardy, Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, Doctor Who,Endeavour and The Tudors, will direct his first major feature. The cast includes Gemma Arterton(Tamara Drewe, The Disappearance of Alice Creed) who is currently starring in Marjane Satrapi’s The Voices following her West End musical stage debut in Made in Dagenham; Paddy Considine from BAFTA-winning British hit Pride, a BAFTA award-winning director for Tyrannosaur and soon to be seen in Macbeth with Michael Fassbender; and the multi-award winning and six-time Oscar® nominated actress Glenn Close, soon to be seen in Tim Blake Nelson’s Anesthesia, Bjorn Runge’s The Wife, last year’s Guardians of the Galaxy and a just-completed starring run on Broadway in A Delicate Balance.
Mike Carey first came to prominence within the world of comic books, writing the Lucifer series at DC Vertigo, Hellblazer for DC, X-Men, Fantastic Four and adapting Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Shadow for Marvel amongst other titles. He also wrote The Unwritten which has made the New York Times graphic novel bestseller list and was awarded Comic Con’s Inkpot Award in 2012. More recently, Carey has moved into prose fiction with thrillers such as The Dead Sea Deception (under the pseudonym of Adam Blake), fantasy novels The City of Silk and Steel and The House of War and Witness and the Felix Castor novels. The Girl with all the Gifts is his most recent novel, published in 2014 to critical acclaim and attracting multitudes of fans including writer-director Joss Whedon who proclaimed it to be: “Heartfelt, remorseless and painfully human…as fresh as it is terrifying. A jewel.”
SHE WHO BRINGS GIFTS is due to shoot in the UK in May 2015 and is produced by Camille Gatin, co-producer of James Marsh’s Shadow Dancer and Ricky Gervais’s Special Correspondents co-starring Eric Bana, and Angus Lamont, producer of the Berlin Competition Jury award-winning ’71 directed by Yann Demange. The feature has been developed with the support of the BFI Film Fund.
SHE WHO BRINGS GIFTS is the story of Melanie, a girl who is full of questions about the world. Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class. When they come for her, Sergeant Parks keeps his gun pointing at her while two of his people strap her into a wheelchair. She thinks they don’t like her. She jokes that she won’t bite. But they don’t laugh.
Melanie is a very special girl.
Camille Gatin says, “It’s hugely exciting to combine Mike Carey’s truly original script and Colm McCarthy’s dynamic yet sensitive style, with such a terrific cast.”
Angus Lamont adds, “Melanie’s story is a completely unique take on a much loved genre, seamlessly blending together a lonely child’s search for love and family with a terrifying journey where she controls the fate of the last adult humans on earth.”
Will Clarke, Co-CEO and Chairman of Altitude Film Entertainment says, “SHE WHO BRINGS GIFTS is a smart take on the sci-fi genre and with a humanity which will draw a young adult audience and those already aware of Mike Carey’s best-selling novel. With the great cast that has come on board we have a highly commercial film which can cut through to a broad audience.”
The Brit List is a compendium of stellar scripts by non-US writers, set up to complement the US Black List with previous scripts which have made the List in previous years including The King’s Speech, My Week with Marilyn and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.
Altitude Film Sales has recently announced new projects it is representing internationally including ANTHROPOID, to be directed by Oscar® and BAFTA-nominated British filmmaker Sean Ellis (Metro Manila, Cashback), co-written by Ellis with Anthony Frewin (Colour Me Kubrick: A True…ish Story) and starring Jamie Dornan (Fifty Shades of Grey, The Fall) and Cillian Murphy (Inception, The Dark Knight Rises); and PALIO, a new documentary from award-winning filmmaker Cosima Spender (Without Gorky, Dolce Vita Africana) and co-produced by James Gay-Rees (Amy, Senna) and John Hunt.