Award winning Grays Point writer and director Warren Duncan is about to jump into filming perhaps his biggest project yet - an adaptation of Stephen King's Willa, from his collection Just After Sunset.
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Filming is due to begin in NSW in 2024 thanks to The Dollar Baby Program and Kickstarter, which has crowd-funded more than $40,000 for production.
The campaign is aiming to break the record as the most-backed Stephen King short film on any crowd-funding platform.
Funds are needed to better fund production, increase pay for cast and crew, and enable more film festival entries. Stephen King makes many of his short stories available for filmmakers to adapt as part of The Dollar Baby Program.
This isn't Mr Duncan's first foray into the Stephen King film universe, with his previous Stephen King short film All That You Love also being crowd-funded on Kickstarter. It holds the record as the most-backed Stephen King short film on any crowd-funding platform.
Willa, from The Raven Flies West Films and 19th Edition Films, tells the story of David who wakes up on a train platform unable to find his fiancé Willa. The other passengers warn him not to go into town to look for her, but he goes anyway. He finds Willa sitting alone at a pub in the nearby town and what she reveals to him will change the course of their lives forever. Willa combines an ideal mix of horror and drama. It stars Tal Hymans, Michael Albrecht, Tahlia Crinis, Ambrose Randall and Ivy Giovanna Axisa.
Mr Duncan says he has always been a "massive Stephen King fan". "I watched It many years back when I was probably way too young to be watching it," he said. "I was hooked and then found his books, which I have been reading my whole life. I finished his entire back catalogue last week.
"I'm a horror fan, but King has just got such a great way of describing things and he's really good at writing amazing characters. A lot of people see him as just a horror writer but there's so much more to him. His stories are essentially about people and the horror is just a by-product of everything that is going on."
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