[This will be parked up at the top of the page for the next twelve hours or so with new material following below. What can I say ... I'm rather fond of it ...]
Please, god, let this film get made. Ask me what the high point of Cannes 2007 was for me and the answer will come quickly. It wasn't meeting Pen-Ek Ratanaruang. It wasn't any of the amazing films I saw. Nope. The high point came when Spanish producer Cormac Regan - yep, a Spaniard with an incredibly Irish name - dropped this bomb on me.
Transharmonic Nights is a nw feature film in development right now that fuses the unique worlds and manic creativity of directors Cesar Velasco Broca and Nacho Vigalondo, both of whom are enormous favorites here in Twitch-land. The two are great friends, working together frequently, and this particular project is a romantic science fiction feature which Vigalondo wrote for Velasco Broca to direct.
Here's the pitch. We begin in the afterlife. Since everybody has a different concept of what paradise should be the god of the universe - in this case a giant octopus-monster - has decided that everyone will get to choose their own paradise at the moment of their death and live in that paradise for all eternity. Our hero has chosen a very simple moment: one day years ago, while sitting at the side of a forest road a young woman rode her motorcycle past him; their eyes met; they felt a moment of connection; she continued on her way and they never met again. He loves the moment for its simplicity, for its self contained perfection, and so he lives that moment over and over again. Until, one day, the girl fails to crest the hill and in her place comes a swarm of rampaging aliens, ray guns a-blazing. You see, the alien horde's idea of paradise is to destroy everybody else's paradise. Our hero escapes and somehow manages to contact the octopus-god to learn what has gone wrong. There he is told that if he can find the girl and recreate the scene exactly as it happened everything will be restored as it was. And so he sets of on his quest ...
Brilliant, no? We've gotten our hands on an extensive gallery of storyboards, plus the film's lovingly hand painted teaser poster for you to take a gander at. But beware! Some of these images may constitute spoilers. Continue at your own risk ...
Yeah, sounds cool, creative and somewhat expensive. It'll never get made.
Creative, yeah, but not necessarily expensive. Cesar's been doing shorts with these crazy 50's alien effects for a while now with absolutely tiny budgets so he knows how to do it without spending a lot of money.
The OctoGod is somewhere between The Crawling Eye and Terror Vision. Nice.
Oh, yeah, that Vigalondo is a famous spaniard's oil looser.
aloha a todo el mundo!!!
en españa hay mucho más que sol y toros. A pesar del conservadurismo actual en todo el mundo, siempre hay gente especial que destaca sin más, y parece que es ahora cuando otros lo ven. me alegro. ya era hora!
ánimo césar, el mundo que difiere del resto está contigo y con tu obra.