No-one ever seems quite sure whether the British film industry is experiencing a golden age or a bad case of the Mondays, but one thing's for sure: it's churning out some serious talent. The likes of Duncan Jones, Rupert Wyatt and Gareth Edwards have impressed the bigwigs of Tinseltown sufficiently to be handed the keys to the kingdom and the next wave of British filmmaking talent - Julian Gilbey, Ben Wheatley et al - seems poised to follow in their footsteps.
Gilbey's chase thriller A Lonely Place To Die has been glimpsed by the right eyeballs: producer Lloyd Levin's to be exact. Levin has signed him up to direct Offworld, a sci-fi chock full of the kind of extra-terrestrials that'd give Dutch, Mac and the rest of the Predator crew pause for serious thought.
"It's a kind of an intergalactic Naked Prey," Levin told Empire, "a pedal-to-the-metal safari movie set on an alien planet. There's lots of nasty creatures - some even on the good guys' side."
Levin has worked with directors of the calibre of Guillermo Del Toro, Paul Greengrass and Paul Thomas Anderson, so Gilbey should be in safe hands for his Hollywood debut. So why Gilbey? "A Lonely Place To Die is a movie after my own heart," Levin explained. "I loved how physical and visceral it was."
While Gilbey has previously partnered up with his brother, Will, to script his Scottish-set thriller and crime movies Rise Of The Footsoldier and Rollin' With The Nines, American screenwriter David Leslie Johnson will be the man behind the typewriter on Offworld. When it comes to bringing nasties to life, Johnson has rhesus-splashed previous: he's wrote **Orphan **and is currently working on season two of The Walking Dead. Watch this space for more as get it.