Hollywood director to shoot parts for new film on streets of Birmingham
HOLLYWOOD legend Steven Spielberg is heading to Birmingham to shoot a big budget science fiction thriller starring Oscar winner Mark Rylance.
Shooting for Ready Player One, a virtual reality thriller set in 2044, will start in the city’s famous Jewellery Quarter on September 5 with an advance party of set designers and technicians descending on the area a fortnight earlier to prepare the ground.
Advance filming will also place on the night of August 19.
The announcement is something of a coup for the city as it is the second Warner Bros film to shoot in Birmingham in successive years.
It follows on from The Girl With All the Gifts, starring Glenn Close, for- take mer Bond girl Gemma Arterton and Paddy Considine. That will be released on September 23.
Scenes for Twentieth Century Fox sequel Kingsman: The Golden Circle were also shot in the city this spring, suggesting Birmingham as a backdrop is on the way up in the movie world.
Ready Player One will star Rylance – winner of the best supporting actor for last year’s Bridge Of Spies – and Star Trek’s Simon Pegg, who once used to busk in Birmingham to supplement his income while studying at Stratford-upon-Avon College.
Action scenes will be shot in Livery Street, Water Street, Henrietta Street, Mary Ann Street, Lionel Street and Newhall Street, where buildings will be transformed as the area doubles for the America of the future.
Meticulous preparations have been under way for months so that the world’s highest-grossing film director can hit the ground running.
Shooting has already taken place in London and production moves on to Louisiana after Birmingham.
Letters have been sent to local residents and businesses in the Jewel- lery Quarter, advising of the shooting schedule for a movie “set in the future and based in America”.
Ready Player One is based on a best-selling 2011 science fiction novel by Ernest Cline, who has co- written the movie screenplay.
Rylance plays a character called James Donovan Halliday, the creator of a virtual world into which people escape from a depressing dystopian reality where they must solve puzzles based on Halliday’s obsession with the pop culture of the past.
After his death, there is a billionaire’s fortune to be won but, when orphan Wade Watts cracks the first clue, he finds others out to kill him so that they can claim the prize themselves.
A Film Birmingham spokesman said no details about the Ready Player One shoot could be discussed – but one of the Midland filmmakers involved said: “Spielberg is definitely coming to Birmingham and I’m thrilled because he’s my hero. The sets we have already been working on are incredible.”
The movie’s planned release date is Good Friday 2018.