Director John McNaughton and producer Steven A. Jones were in lower Manhattan, poised to return to the horror thriller genre after a 20-year absence, when Hurricane Sandy struck the East Coast and stalled production on their new film The Harvest.
“I don’t want to whine because a lot of people had it a lot worse,” Jones insists. “We were in apartments in the dark zone. I was on the 12th floor with no lights, no electricity, no water. Our production office was shut down.”
The delay pushed their schedule up against the start of later projects for leads Michael Shannon and Samantha Morton and ate into the $7 million budget. But they worked it out, and moved to a Nov. 29 start date.
The Harvest is McNaughton and Jones’s eighth film together, stretching back to Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and including The Borrower, Mad Dog and Glory, Normal Life, and Wild Things.
In The Harvest, Morton and Shannon play the parents of a boy with a debilitating disease (Charlie Tahan, I Am Legend), befriended by a newly orphaned girl (Natasha Calis, The Possession) who has moved in with her neighboring grandfather (Peter Fonda).
Naturally, however, “everything is not as it seems,” Jones says. “We’re looking forward to creeping people out.”
The Harvest screenwriter Stephen Lancellotti approached McNaughton to direct through The Gersh Agency, which represents them both. Shannon came on early this year, then once Morton was attached over the summer, producers Kim Jose and David Robinson of Elephant Eye Films secured private equity investment.
Shoot takes place in New York
They had contemplated a Chicago shoot, but the stars’ commitments made the Pallisades, New York location more practical. Shannon is currently acting onstage in Craig Wright’s Grace at Manhattan’s Cort Theater, with Paul Rudd, Ed Asner, and Shannon’s girlfriend Kate Arrington. “He shoots with us during the day and does his play at night,” Jones says.
Rachel Morrison (Sound of My Voice) is DP for the 29-day shoot. Bill Pankow (The Untouchables) is editor.
Throughout preproduction, Jones has commuted between New York and Chicago. “That’s been a burner,” he says. He just finished teaching a music video course at DePaul, where he has been producer-in-residence since 2009.
McNaughton and Jones are also developing the TV series Chicago Hack, which McNaughton adapted from Dmitri Samarov’s cab driver memoir Hack.
With Peter Newman, they’re developing John Wohlbruck’s feature script Sweet, about two high school misfits whose small town conspires to keep apart.
