Actors and producers risk safety, defy shutdown to complete all-important Children Of The Corn reboot
Sometimes true art requires sacrifice. Did Beethoven stop composing when an errant bassoon drove him deaf? Did Andy Warhol stop painting when he was down to his final can of soup? And did Michelangelo give up carving the David after the Shredder kidnapped April O’Neil? To all these, we say: Hell no. And thus, too, do we have this latest example of the creative muse driving people onward in the face of regulations, multiple insurance policies, and that demon of mediocrity known as common sense: A group of actors and filmmakers coming together to work tirelessly to try to find a COVID-19-safe way to ensure that the world would receive a Kurt Wimmer-directed Children Of The Corn movie without too inconvenient of a delay.
This is per Variety, which reports on what sounds like a Herculean effort to bring to the people an adaptation of a Stephen King story about creepy corn children, directed by the guy who made the movie where Christian Bale makes Taye Diggs’ face slide off his face. (Also: Ultraviolet.) Filmed in Australia, this new version of King’s 1978 story about kids who rise up and kill their parents in the name of an unseen harvest god was apparently a labor of…love?… for all involved, with producers outlining the numerous precautions they put in place to ensure that all their workers would still be, well, we were going to say “safe,” but still not nearly as safe as they’d be if they hadn’t bothered to make the movie in the first place, right? Anyway:
“We ended up taking hundreds of measures,” Ford v. Ferrari producer Lucas Foster told interviewers. “We did not trust the whole. Instead, we broke down every scene separately. Night. Day. Crowds. Interiors. And so on, assessing different levels of risk.” Even so, though, “You can theorize all you like about safety protocols, but until you get on set, you don’t really know. But I can now tell you it is impossible to keep a camera crew 1.5 meters apart.”
The article cites multiple ways the film’s producers tried to keep people safe—remote auditions for its young cast, a heavy reliance on Mad Max: Fury Road’s Jon Heaney as a safety manager—but puts especial focus on the real hero in this scenario: The insurance, which was apparently purchased early and in abundance. (After all, the vast majority of production shutdowns have been at least as much about not being able to cover a film or TV show’s financial situation if everyone gets sick, as they are any sort of humanitarian effort.) In any case, it all appears to have worked out, for a given scenario where “worked out” somehow translates to “new Kurt Wimmer/Children Of The Corn flick.” The film reportedly wrapped up filming earlier this week, and all was right with the world.