The trailer of Jemaine Clement’s latest big-budget movie has been released. Photo / Getty Images
The trailer of Jemaine Clement’s latest big-budget movie has been released. Photo / Getty Images
Ricardo Simich reveals movie news for talented Kiwis.
Next weekend New Zealand movie A Mistake will premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York and in the meantime, the trailer of Jemaine Clement’s latest big-budget movie has been released.
Fans of Clement are going to love seeing him star alongside Shazam luminary Zachary Levi in Columbia Pictures’ Harold and the Purple Crayon.
Levi stars as a man who has had a magical purple crayon since his childhood that makes whatever he draws come to life.
The live-action movie is based on Crockett Johnson’s beloved children’s 1955 book of the same name.
Clement is at his deadpan best playing Gary, who, at first befriends Harold before turning villainous when he gets hold of a piece of Harold’s crayon to use for evil.
Clement is in great comic company in a zany plotline that is sure to be a hit when the movie comes out in September.
New Girl’s Zooey Deschanel plays Harold’s possible love interest and Lil Rel Howery of The Carmichael Show plays one of Harold’s animal friends, a moose that becomes human in the real world.
Levi is due in New Zealand later this year to film world-famous New Zealand stuntwoman and co-ordinator Zoë Bell’s feature film directorial debut here in the action-packed movie Free Fall.
Clement is having a big year. He is understood to be currently filming Aussie rugby league series Plum across the Tasman, which comes off the back of filming Andrew Niccol’s I, Object in Wellington and Jason Momoa’s Minecraft in Auckland earlier this year. Mixed in with all of that, he is featured as Dr Garvin in the Avatar 3, 4 and 5 movies, which film in Wellington.
New Zealand movie A Mistake, which had Hollywood megastar Elizabeth Banks base herself in Auckland last year during filming, will have its world debut this Friday at the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival in New York.
A Mistake, featuring Elizabeth Banks, will have its world debut at the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival. Photo / Getty Images
The film’s Kiwi director, Christine Jeffs of Sylvia fame, is confirmed to be in attendance and Spy is hoping some of Banks’ New Zealand co-stars - who include Matthew Sunderland, Rena Owen, Joel Tobeck, Fern Sutherland, Robbie Magasiva, Emmett Skilton, Niwa Whatuira and Ally Xue - might make the red carpet too.
Banks performance as a surgeon unravelling under her split-second decision has already been critiqued as powerful.
Jeffs co-produced A Mistake with Matthew Metcalfe of GFC Films, who tells Spy he is thrilled Jeffs can make it and he is very sad he won’t be able to make it himself, as he is filming in London.
Metcalfe is in pre-production for Moss & Freud, which will also shoot in New Zealand later this year.
The NZ Film Commission is helping fund the movie about the intimate friendship between supermodel Kate Moss and the late British painter Lucian Freud.
The film depicts 80-year-old Freud painting a nude and pregnant Moss over nine months in 2002, after he read an interview with her in which she said she’d like to pose for him.
Metcalfe is working with Academy Award-winning writer and director James Lucas. Lucas pitched the idea to Metcalfe before the pair approached Moss about the project.
“I was immediately intrigued,” Metcalfe told Spy last year.
“His take was fascinating and showed a side of the iconic Kate Moss that I had never seen. I am a huge fan of James and greenlit development straight away,” he says.
Once they had the story worked out and they felt confident - they approached Moss.
All three then selected UK actress, Disney+ Willow star Ellie Bamber to play Moss.
“When Kate and Ellie met, they hit it off and we knew we had made the right casting decision.”
