For every Cary Fukunaga and Marc Webb, there are about a dozen examples of filmmakers who’ve made it big with their first film at Sundance only to find themselves sludging through the same growing pains in the second time out. You might say this was the case for the working Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer tandem. They made a decent sized splash in Park City with Quinceañera (it got picked up by SPC), only to be stuck in gestation/financing period that is finally changing for the better (I’m guessing vampires truly are the big thing.
Screen Daily reports that Dominic Cooper, Julie Christie and Imogen Poots are currently attached to Hello Darkness — which has Bobby Allen and Alexandra Stone producing, with Steve Golin, one of my favorites Todd Haynes and Adam Shulman acting as executive producers. Here’s a long form synopsis and I’m thinking the trio of actors actually fit the characters fairly well:
Mark Cooper (played by Cooper) is an ordinary working-class man who became a vampire. He reached his prime in the early sixties and as a result of his conversion, never left it. Eternally young, he is the Angry Young Man preserved in amber. He lives in Newcastle, a town famed for its drunken excess, providing ideal feeding grounds. But the accidental death of a girl ends with a manhunt for a “Vampire Killer.”
Cooper lives with Rachel (Christie), his support for almost four decades, in an uneasy role somewhere between wife and mother. Long ago Cooper proposed to convert Rachel, but she chose to grow older while he remains eternally twenty-five. News that he’s a wanted man brings the tension in the house to breaking point. On the prowl for victims, Cooper meets a beautiful posh student, Lucy (Poots). Entranced by her vivacity, he gets his overpowering first taste of blue blood. But the union between Cooper and Lucy brews trouble; it brings out the staunch territorialism of Rachel and the snobbishness of Lucy’s friends. Meanwhile, the search for the Vampire Killer is intensifying. Cooper is driven into a crisis as he stares bleakly into eternity, and Lucy is forced to choose between the light moneyed world of her peers and the dark working class reality of her lover.
