EXCLUSIVE: UK actor Emily Watson has joined the cast of Mackenzie Crook’s directorial debut, Mars Express.
As previously announced by Screen, Altitude is selling the project, which also stars Crook’s Detectorists co-star Toby Jones.
Watson confirmed her role while speaking to Screen at the Sarajevo Film Festival, where she is head of the jury and has received the honorary Heart of Sarajevo award.
The project tells the true story of Colin and Judith Pillinger, to be played by Jones and Watson, and their mission to find life on Mars back in the late 1990s. With no prior experience of building a spacecraft, the English farmers pulled together a team of misfits who took on NASA and almost won.
Producers are Big Talk Studios and Altitude, developed in association with BBC Film. It is due to shoot in the UK later this year, and will have a soundtrack of Britpop classics.
Altitude will also release the film theatrically in the UK and Ireland. Joe Bone has written the script, based on Colin Pillinger’s book My Life On Mars: The Beagle 2 Diaries.
Watson is also starring in the second series of Dune: Prophecy, scheduled for release later this year, and has recently wrapped on Mira Nair’s Amri.
Reflecting on how the industry has changed across her over 30-year career, Watson said: ”There was a period, the golden age of television and all of that, where suddenly, I was just the right side of that rolling wave, to be getting really interesting things come my way. Chernobyl, those kinds of things. Pivotal, interesting, powerful.
”Definitely in Hollywood terms, the age thing is still very restrictive. In independent film, I still have much of a life in it.
“The breadth of subject matter has really changed, there’s not such a narrow focus on stories.
“I think long-form television might be in its death throes. There has been such an over-proliferation. There’s only so much people can see, and so much that can be good. But I think we’re at an interesting point because everybody’s saying, ‘Cinema’s impossible and we can’t get everything made.’ But kids want to sit in the theatre and watch movies together. Phones have made people so isolated, they are craving communities.”
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