First Look: Alan Moore’s ‘The Show,’ Starring Tom Burke
By Leo Barraclough
LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – The first look image has been released from British independent movie “The Show,” based on an original story by graphic novel creator Alan Moore, best known for “Watchmen,” “V for Vendetta,” “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” and “From Hell.” The cast is led by Tom Burke, whose credits include “War and Peace,” “The Souvenir” and “Only God Forgives.”
Other members of the cast include Siobhan Hewlett (“Show Pieces”), Ellie Bamber (“Nocturnal Animals,” “The Nutcracker and the Four Realms”), Sheila Atim (“Girl From the North Country”), Richard Dillane (“The White Princess,” “The Last Post”) and Moore himself.
The movie is directed by Mitch Jenkins from a script by Moore, his first original feature film screenplay to be produced. Production is underway in Northampton, U.K. Moore and Jenkins previously produced “Show Pieces,” a cycle of short films.
“The Show” follows Fletcher Dennis (Burke), who has been hired to track down a stolen artefact. This leads him to Northampton, a “haunted town” at “England’s broken heart” that has “collapsed to a black hole of dreams.” Burke finds himself “sinking in a quicksand twilight world of dead Lotharios, comatose sleeping beauties, Voodoo gangsters, masked adventurers, unlikely 1930s private eyes and violent chiaroscuro women.”
Jim Mooney and Mike Elliott of EMU Films and Lex Films’ Tom Brown are producing. Finance is provided by BFI, awarding funds from the National Lottery, along with Lipsync. Protagonist Pictures will handle worldwide sales.
“I wanted to see if it was possible to create an immersive and addictive world with no throwaway dialogue and no throwaway characters, a world where every character is memorable, distinctive and attempting to steal the whole show for themselves, just as we do in real life,” Moore said.
“I wanted to take some very old-school approaches to film and to find out, alongside Mitch Jenkins, what would happen if you connected them up with some very modern ideas and technical capabilities, and I wanted to make a piece of radical and progressive cinema that was also ridiculously sumptuous, involving and entertaining: a genuinely spectacular show.”
