![]() ![]() In consultation with unions and public health officials, the “Songbird” team soon settled on a stringent series of protocols for safely going into production. In the midst of a pandemic that was wreaking havoc on business-as-usual in Hollywood, wanting to make the film and actually making it were very different things. ![]() “Adam said, ‘Listen, there’s nothing more scary for any of us than what’s really out there at the moment,’ ” says Mason. Goodman told Mason he was prepared to greenlight the movie but that he and Boyes should scrap the rampaging-monster idea for something more immediate and timely. With little expectation but nothing to lose, he decided to send the idea to producer Adam Goodman, a former president of Paramount Pictures who has been looking for innovative ways to make smaller-budget projects through his production company Invisible Narratives. ![]() With film production at a standstill, Mason planned to make the movie on a shoestring budget with some actor friends using iPhones and laptops it would serve as much as a distraction and a way to stay busy as anything else. “I was trying to use the monster as a metaphor for the virus.” In their original conception, which they hastily fleshed out in a 12-page treatment, the film was to be a kind of found-footage creature feature à la “Cloverfield.” “The idea was a monster movie set during a lockdown where people thought they were locked down for a pandemic and then they realize it was actually a monster,” says Mason. ![]() Mason and Boyes hadn’t initially planned to make a coronavirus thriller at all. That the trailer came bearing the imprimatur of Bay, who is known more for slam-bang, testosterone-fueled action than for nuance, probably didn’t help. With the country heading into a deadly winter, many lambasted the notion of a dystopian coronavirus thriller as tone deaf and in poor taste. When the trailer for “Songbird” was released in late October, reaction on social media was swift and, perhaps not surprisingly, deeply skeptical. Think “Romeo and Juliet” with hazmat suits. courier named Nico (Apa), who is immune to the disease, attempts to find a way out of the nightmare with his girlfriend, Sara (Sofia Carson), who has been trapped for years in lockdown. In this bleak and blighted landscape, an L.A. The first major feature film to be made during the pandemic in Los Angeles, “Songbird” is set in 2023, with the world under siege from a coronavirus that has gone through several increasingly deadly mutations and the infected forced into oppressive quarantine camps known as Q-Zones. Then again, there’s been a whole lot about the nine months that no one ever could have imagined. He said, ‘What’s happening is terrible, but we should just get together and make a movie like we did in the old days.’ ”Īt that point, Mason never could have imagined that, just nine months later, the film born of that phone call, the dystopian pandemic sci-fi thriller “Songbird,” would be heading toward its PVOD release this Friday, with Michael Bay on board as a producer and a cast including Bradley Whitford, Demi Moore, Craig Robinson and “Riverdale” star KJ Apa. “He and I came out of this very guerrilla filmmaking world back in England. “My writing partner Simon Boyes called me up, sounding unexpectedly excited,” Mason says. Having directed a string of low-budget horror films and thrillers with titles like “The Devil’s Chair,” “Blood River” and “They Come Knocking,” the 45-year-old Mason was now coming face-to-face with true fear. He was worried about his wife and three young children, with whom he shares a two-bedroom duplex in L.A., and about his aging parents living 5,000 miles away in his native England. With the worsening coronavirus crisis triggering lockdowns and blaring headlines around the country, a passion project Mason was set to direct for Blumhouse Pictures had shut down just five days into pre-production. On March 14, filmmaker Adam Mason, like virtually everyone else in Hollywood and across the planet Earth, was freaking out. ![]()
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