Filming of Easter Rising production to begin in September

MICHAEL DWYER, Film Correspondent

THERE MAY well be many movies, documentaries and TV series to mark the centenary of the 1916 Rising, but Los Angeles-based producer Nicola Charles is getting in early with a feature film titled Easter Sixteen , which she aims to have in production by the autumn.

Guy Pearce, the Australian star of LA Confidential and Memento , has agreed to play Patrick Pearse in the film.

English actor Ian Hart, who has featured in four Neil Jordan films including Michael Collins and The Butcher Boy , will portray Thomas Clarke.

The third key role, James Connolly, has yet to be cast.

“It is my intention to make a vivid and brutal story of humanity, sustained belief, loyalty, love, cruelty and carnage,” Ms Charles told The Irish Times .

“The picture is full of characters who are tangled, imperfect and complex.”

She says that she has raised close to 80 per cent of the film’s $25 million (€19 million) budget and that she is now seeking the additional investment required for the film to begin shooting in Dublin in September.

“For me as a producer, the time to make this movie is now,” she says.

“We are making an independently financed movie and it has taken us a year to get it to this point, holding our breaths through every twist and turn of the world’s financial markets.

“Luckily, as the dust begins to settle, we remain standing with the majority of our cast and crew attachments.”

Ms Charles is making the film through her production company, Marathon Pictures.

Easter Sixteen will be directed by her business partner in the company, Jason Barry, who is from Dublin and has acted in over a dozen movies, including Titanic .

He will feature briefly as Roger Casement in Easter Sixteen . He and Ms Charles met in 2000 when they acted together in the Australian film Muggers and they subsequently married and had two children.

Easter Sixteen is based on a screenplay by Belfast writer Brendan Foley, who wrote and was a producer on the 2006 thriller Johnny Was, which featured Vinnie Jones as a former IRA bomber whose past catches up with him in London, along with Patrick Bergin, Samantha Mumba, Roger Daltrey and Lennox Lewis.