Want an early favorite for next year’s awards season? How about Sacrifice, a star-studded package set to hit the Cannes market in a few weeks. Deadline reports the film will bring together Chris Evans, Anya Taylor-Joy, Salma Hayek Pinault, and Brendan Fraser with acclaimed Athena filmmaker Romain Gavras directing.
Sacrifice will mark Gavras’ English-language debut, and like Athena it’s another anarchic thriller, albeit one with Greek mythology weaved in. The story kicks off when “a high-end charity gala is raided by a violent group of radicals on a mystical quest to fulfill a prophecy”. Taylor-Joy plays the antagonist, with Evans as a movie star she has tapped to die.
Gavras teamed with Succession writer Will Arbery on the screenplay. The filmmaker talked about his idea for Sacrifice and the idea of adding Greek mythological concepts to it…
“It came from a very simple idea,” Gavras said, “which is every time you go to those events, whether it’s in Cannes, whether it’s a charity event and where you have all those people, the mischievous side of me, and I think the audience as well when they’re watching those events, they kind of want something to go really horribly wrong. When you see glitzy people and all the shininess and all that stuff, you want that moment to be twisted, right?”
“I was raised myself on Greek mythology,” continued the director. “Instead of being fed new movies when I was a kid, my parents were telling me these Greek tales, where a mom eats her kids and of sacrifices to volcanoes. Those things fed me and led to the idea of having a group of kids that have a very specific agenda that comes from a very mythological kind of belief system. There is the fondness of satire and Will is amazing at the sharpness of the tone of the characters and the humanity of them. I am so excited by our cast.”
The plan is for Sacrifice to shoot in September.
