The actor Mark Webber is to make a film based on his real life relationship with his young son. Webber, who is best known for playing Steven Stills in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, wrote the script, is directing and is staring in the currently untitled film, in which Micheal Cera, Amanda Seyfried, Shannon Sossamon and Jason Ritter will co star.
Heres the deets, straight from The Hollywood Reporter
The movie (with a budget well below $1 million) centers on a struggling single father, an actor played by Webber, raising his two-year-old son after the death of the child’s mother. Because the story so closely mirrors Webber’s own life story, he is using his own two-and-a-half year old son to play the young boy in the film.
“That’s the crux of the film,” Webber said, having just returned to L.A. from Sundance. “After spending so much time with my son being a father, I became obsessed with the idea of showing the most authentic father-son dynamic on screen.”
He said he is taking great pains to shield his son from the rigors of the shoot and conducted tests to see if he could make it as non-invasive as possible. To that end, he is shooting with no crew — just himself, a director of photography and a sound guy — and is using Canon 5D Cameras.
“It’s been really cool and eye-opening to limit the exposure to my son but create the scenes and moments that seem realistically uncomfortable,” Webber said. “The blurring of boundaries and the overcompensation that you do with a child — how you look to them for affection when it’s not appropriate? It’s been an exercise to capture real life moments and still tell a compelling story.”
He goes on to say how Cera and co (Webbers real life friends) will be a different version of how they are in normal life, and he’s “getting them to show a real side of who they are and smash that up with people’s expectations of celebrity.”
Sounds kinda nice. I loved him in Scott Pilgrim, and even in the special features and outtakes, he seemed like a nice guy. The concept is really cool, but perhaps may be too personal? We’ll see. I hope it comes along well. I particularly love how cheap they’re going with it, using the canon cameras and no crew, and if it gets the natural look they’re after, thats fantastic.
Anyone else like the sound of this?
That sounds really really cool to me. I’ll have to keep an eye out for it.