A24 has released the first official clip from The Rover, written and directed by David Michod and starring Guy Pearce and Robert Pattinson. The thriller will be making its world premiere at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, and this just-released clip (“God Put a Bullet In You”) features the two main characters deep in serious conversation.
The Plot:
The Rover, David Michod’s highly anticipated follow-up to Animal Kingdom, is set in a world 10 years following the collapse of society. The rule of the law has disintegrated and life is cheap. The film follows hardened loner Eric (Pearce) as he travels the desolate towns and roads of the outback. When a gang of thieves steals his car they leave behind a wounded Rey (Pattinson) in their wake. Forcing Rey to help track the gang, Eric will go to any lengths to take back the one thing that still matters to him. Michod also wrote the film based on a story he conceived with Joel Edgerton.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT:
The Australian Outback of The Rover is a world ten years after a great Western economic collapse. It’s a near future of social and economic decay. Services, utilities, law and order have fallen into dangerous disrepair. And yet people from all corners of the world have come to this place to work the mines that feed the new world alignment, that feed the great powerhouses of this, the Asian century.
The world of the movie, as such, mirrors the American and Australian gold rushes of the 19th century. People are drawn to the land’s mines and with them come the leeches, the refuse, the hustlers and criminals who hope to exploit the mines’ margins.
This isn’t a complete collapse of society – it’s an inversion of present-day global power dynamics. This is Australia as resource-rich Third World country. This is the violence and unrest of contemporary Sierra Leone or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
And at the centre of this world are two men – one, a murderously embittered Australian man, a former soldier who has lost his farm and his family; the other, a simple and naive American boy, too young to remember a time when things were anything other than what they are.”
– David Michod
Watch the clip:
-By Rebecca Murray
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