A-Team director Joe Carnahan got some good news recently – the go-ahead to start shooting his next film, stripped-down thriller The Grey, which finds Liam Neeson as one of a group of oil rig workers whose plane crashes in the Alaskan tundra, leaving them at the mercy of a particularly lethal (and hungry) pack of wolves. Now he’s tracked down a few names to play Neeson’s colleagues, with Dermot Mulroney, James Badge Dale, Frank Grillo, Nonso Anozie and Joe Anderson all signing on.
We hope they’re packing their thermal long johns, as Carnahan is busy setting up the production in locations around Canada’s frosty Vancouver and even chillier Northern British Columbia regions. “It gets to be 30 below, and when we went out the other day, I took off my hat to see how long I could last, and my skin was burning with frostbite in a little over a minute,” Carnahan tells Deadline. “In a way, it’s great, because it beats the s**t out of the cast and that suits the storyline.”
The Grey represents a return to the sort of quick ‘n’ thrifty shooting that Carnahan employed for his first – and still best – film. “I haven’t had a situation like this since Narc, where there’s no distributor, but you get to make the movie you want to, staying as light on your feet as you can.” He plans to film for 40 days, probably so that Neeson and co. actually survive the cold.
But don’t go thinking that he’ll skimp on the animal action. “The wolves have a territorial range of 300 miles, and they will run you out if you cross that. If you’re within 30 miles of their den as is the case here, they will try to kill you. It’s simple arithmetic, but it creates an opportunity for one of those man vs. nature movies I love like Deliverance and Touching The Void.”
The first one to make a "something to get his teeth into" gag will be hunted down by **Empire's **trained wolf pack. Well, they're cocker spaniels, but they can nip your ankles something rotten.