Tom Woodruff Jr. is an Academy Award winning creature designer responsible for such creations as The Terminator, Aliens, Wolf, Starship Troopers, and many more. He is embarking on his directorial debut with the film Fire City: The Interpreter of Signs. News has come out the Woodruff Jr. has cast the lead actor in the film with breakout actor Tobias Jelinek. Read on below for more details.
From The Press Release
Academy Award-Winning Special Effects Designer, Tom Woodruff, Jr., whose company, Amalgamated Dynamics, known for such films as Spider-Man, X-Men: First Class and Alien Vs. Predator, cast breakout unknown Tobias Jelinek in the lead role for Woodruff’s upcoming directorial debut, Fire City: The Interpreter of Signs. (www.firecity.com)
“We wanted to discover the star of tomorrow, not chase after the star of today,” says writer-producer, Brian Lubocki. “We deliberately sought a great unknown actor, and it paid off.”
In a world where demons live secretly among us, Jelinek plays Atum Vine, a winged demon who develops something unheard of in the demon world: compassion. Vine must make the ultimate choice, when the life of a young human girl is in jeopardy and all of Demonkind hangs in the balance.
Also joining the cast is longtime character actor and co-founder of the Stan Winston School of Character
Arts, Matt Winston, whose long list of credits includes Zodiac,Fight Club and Little Miss Sunshine.
Lubocki and writing-producing partner, Michael Hayes, came off a successful Kickstarter campaign in August and are shooting in Los Angeles in late February 2014. This is the first installment of an independent feature film franchise set in Fire City, a story world dubbed by the studios as “Harry Potter for an adult audience.”
Casting continues for the thoroughly scheduled and rigorously planned 18-day shoot. “Now that we have such a competent enthusiastic actor in the lead, we can make it interesting,” says Hayes. “Our remaining roles are diverse yet contained, perfect for a name actor or actress to come out to play in the demon world with us for a couple days.”
Time will tell. One thing is certain: independent commercial genre films are alive and well in Fire City.
