‘A-Team’ Helmer Joe Carnahan To Write And Direct ‘Umbra’
I can’t help but feel a certain sympathy forJoe Carnahan. After coming out of the gate early with the very goodNarc, he struggled to make appropriate follow-ups likeKilling Pabloin between stumbling withSmokin' AcesandThe A-Team.
Mr. Carnahan isworkingnow onThe Grey, with Liam Neeson, but he’s also just signed to rewrite and direct a thriller calledUmbra.
Deadlinesays that Joe Carnahan will rewriteSteven Karczynski’s original draft. The logline sounds miserable: “a man finds an old cassette tape which reveals a horrifying secret.” There’s got to be more to it than that, right? Perhaps. I’m going to condense aScriptShadowreview ofUmbrafrom last year:
Read more of that review if you want, but the core seems to be this: David is really the only key character in the film, which is told very much from his perspective, in an almost claustrophobic way. It sounds like a propulsive script, but one that is based very much on finding out what happens next, and the final reveal, as written in this draft, might not be so satisfying. But the action up until that point is fast and propulsive. So what can Joe Carnahan do with the script?
(One note: Roger Donaldson almost directed this last year for Relativity, with Nicolas Cage starring.)
Fortunately,The Greyis up first, and Mr. Carnahan is pulling together the cast for that film now.The Greyis “about a group of Alaskan pipeline workers whose plane crash lands on their way back home from a remote work site. The workers then find themselves hunted by a pack of wolves. Carnahan describes it as “very much a man vs. nature adventure, existentialist kind of drama that I want to do.”
