EXCLUSIVE: Babak Anvari and Lucan Toh, the team behind hot Sundance pic Wounds, have struck a first-look deal with AMC.
I hear the broadcaster has recently closed the pact to partner with Anvari and Toh’s Two & Two Pictures for television projects.
It comes after their horror feature Wounds, which was written and directed by Anvari and produced by Toh, premiered this year at the Sundance Film Festival. The film, which stars Armie Hammer, Dakota Johnson, Zazie Beetz, Karl Glusman, and Brad William Henke, centers around the mysterious things that impact a bartender after he picks up the phone left behind at his New Orleans bar. It is based on Nathan Ballingrund’s horror novella The Visible Filth.
Wounds was Anvari’s second directorial feature; the British-Iranian helmer previously directed Under The Shadow, a Farsi-language horror pic that stars Narges Rashidi, Avin Manshadi and Bobby Naderi. Set in 1988 Tehran during the Iran-Iraq war, the story sees a mother and daughter struggle to stay together amid the bombing campaigns and bloody revolution while a mysterious evil stalks through their apartment. It was picked up by Netflix in 2016 and earned the pair BAFTAs for Outstanding Debut.
Elsewhere, Anvari is developing projects with Black Bear and Film4. At the former, he is developing a drama set in the deadly Syrian crisis zones about female freedom fighters of Kurdish and Western descent who joined forces to battle against ISIS in an effort to reclaim Raqqa and restore stability to one of the most dangerous places on earth.
At the latter, he is working on contemporary Hitchcockian thriller I Came By.
The first-look deal is the latest struck by the Breaking Bad and Mad Men broadcaster; in 2017, it struck deal with Addictive Pictures, the indie set up by former Guillermo del Toro development executive Russell Ackerman and ex-Scott Rudin exec John Schoenfelder, and One-Two Punch Productions, run by former Mark Gordon Productions president and Criminal Minds producer Deborah Spera. It is thought that the Two & Two Pictures deal is one of a number of new deals that is brewing at The Walking Dead network.
Anvari and Toh are represented at WME, Grandview, and ITG in the UK as well as Ziffren.