EXCLUSIVE: Artwork turns into fiction as René Magritte, Salvador Dalí and their friends give the whodunnit style a surreal makeover in That is Not A Homicide Thriller. Deadline can share an unique new picture from the collection, which is produced by Belgium-based indie Panenka.
Hans Herbots, whose directing credit embody The Serpent and Paris Has Fallen helmed all six eps. “We wished to raise the style and provides it a twist,” he tells Deadline. “This story, this universe, supplied loads of loads of alternative to try this.”
“This isn’t a pipe” is the wording beneath Magritte’s well-known 1929 image ‘The Treachery of Photos’ and That is Not A Homicide Thriller options the enduring Belgian artist and several other of his surrealist friends.
In reality, the collection completely is a homicide thriller – as Sequence Mania attendees will see, with the drama within the Coming Subsequent From Belgium part. It was commissioned by VRT, RTL & Proximus in Belgium and made as a copro with the highly effective alliance of Euro pubcasters New8 and Deadpan Photos. Studiocanal is distributing internationally.
Set within the mid-Nineteen Thirties, it follows a younger René Magritte (Pierre Gervais) after he’s invited to take part in a personal artwork exhibition at an opulent English property owned by the flamboyant Lord James, an occasion that truly occurred.
Fellow company embody Salvador Dali (Iñaki Mur), Lee Miller (Florence Corridor), Man Ray (Frank Bourke), and Max Ernst (Mike Hoffmann). After a wild evening, Magritte wakes up beside the physique of efficiency artist Sheila Legge (Lauren Versnick). Extra our bodies drop and Scotland Yard’s DCI Thistlethwaite (Stephen Tomkinson) and DC Quant (Donna Banya) are dispatched to research
“We wished to translate artwork surrealism into the visible facet of the story,” Herbots explains. “That allowed us to make it way more enjoyable, to do issues that we in any other case may by no means do. We may herald colours and go all the best way with the artwork path and even the tone.
“We have been in a position to elevate up the performances slightly, make them bigger than life, and maintain that with the music and the digital camera strikes.”
Set in England and filmed in Eire and Belgium, the present is predominantly English language. The drama was created by Christophe Dirickx and Paul Baeten and was one of many exhibits chosen in 2022 to be pitched the Co-Professional Sequence occasion, half the Berlin Movie Pageant’s TV exercise.
“It’s whodunnit for a really broad viewers, however with a twist, since you play with actual characters, and also you play with artwork from actual artists,” says producer Kristoffel Mertens. “These artists are extra common than ever as a result of it’s surrealism and that’s cool and it’s very visible and putting. So, for those who return to the title, This Is Not A Homicide Thriller, it’s playful. In the identical manner that we play with the style, we play with the [characters of the] artists.”
This system-makers needed to get the inexperienced mild from varied artists’ foundations to make use of their characters and have a few of their work, including to the complexity of creating the collection.
“That was accomplished as parallel course of with the event of the collection; getting all of the rounds of suggestions on the scripts,” says producer Kato Maes. “All of them liked the pitch, however, in fact, coming from Flanders and being a small producer with such an enormous idea, we needed to dig deep to get that half accomplished.”
