A story about a woman who has lost trust in herself and during the spy intrigue and the machinations she comes to find herself again.
11-years ago first-time producer Georgina Townsley, who has a proven track record in documentaries, conceptualised Unlocked and approached screenwriter Peter O’Brien to help her craft a London-set, female-driven espionage thriller.
“I needed to find a writer who could write for a woman. And I read hundreds of scripts but Peter’s really stood out. He understood women and he could write for a woman, a strong woman,” remembers Townsley.
Once the CIA’s top interrogator, Alice Racine’s (Naomi Rapace) career was sidelined when she failed “to unlock” a prisoner in time to save the lives of dozens of innocent people from a terrorist attack. Now leading a quiet life in London as a caseworker, Alice is unexpectedly called back into action when the CIA apprehends a suspect believed to have direct knowledge of another imminent attack. Alice successfully unlocks the suspect but before she can fully convey the recovered intelligence to her superiors, she gets a call from an old colleague at Langley which heightens her suspicions. Quickly realizing she’s been duped, she narrowly escapes, and finds herself on the run. Grasping that the CIA has been deeply compromised, Alice turns to the few she can trust as she seeks out the responsible parties and races against the clock to prevent a deadly biological attack on the citizens of London.
A deep-seated appreciation of the spy genre
Townsley attributes her deep-seated appreciation of the spy genre to her childhood dream of growing up to be a spy. “From a very young age, I was extremely interested in that world and how it operated, who you could trust, who you can’t trust, and the flow of information, how information is the currency in that world, and that there are different ways of getting that information,” she recalls.
Peter O’Brien is a prolific screenwriter who has numerous studio projects in development. They include an adaptation of Robert Ludlum’s The Chancellor Manuscript for Paramount, with director Marc Forster attached; and a re-write of actioner Line of Sight for Warner Bros. with Ben Affleck as director. Peter also penned the feature film adaptation of The Jury for Fox 2000, based on the British miniseries by Peter Morgan. Most recently, Peter adapted the Linwood Barclay novel, Trust Your Eyes, a Hitchcockian thriller for Todd Phillips to direct.
Peter also wrote the game story for 2010’s Halo: Reach, the fourth installment in Microsoft’s iconic video game franchise and the last to be made by the game’s original developer, Bungie. Peter’s story and writing were lauded by fans and the gaming press, and the title’s launch broke the existing twenty-four hour record at over 200 million.
In 2002, Peter wrote and directed the twisty short thriller Self Storage, produced by Mark Gordon and Betsy Beers, and starring Rainn Wilson (The Office, Six Feet Under) and William Mapother (In the Bedroom, Another Earth, Lost). It won numerous Audience Favorite awards at festivals.
Peter graduated from Northwestern University with an English degree. He currently lives in San Francisco, having grown up in Marin County, California.
“Once I found Peter, we decided to go back to the old ways of looking at the storytelling of spy thrillers and how we wanted to keep the audience guessing. So the structure and the plot is very important as well as making sure that it’s very character-driven,” says Townsley.
“I love those kinds of movies so it was a good match from the beginning,” says O’Brien. “We worked on the script very hard for maybe close to a year and then sort of put it out into the Hollywood world and it was very, very well-received.”
Unlocked even topped 2008’s “The Black List” by which industry insiders declared it to be one of the year’s hottest unproduced screenplays. “It is something that people pay attention to so that sort of put this story on the map for us.” Despite such a prestigious accolade from the film community, the project would still have to undergo various incarnations and several false starts before at last going into production in the fall of 2014.
Eventually Townsley and O’Brien submitted the screenplay to producing powerhouse Lorenzo di Bonaventura and his partner Eric Howsam, both of whom were immediately taken by the intelligence of the script and its sharp dialogue and characterization. Duly impressed, the producers of the Transformers mega-franchise, one of the highest earning in cinema history, joined the project.
“We decided that we wanted a strong Hollywood producer on it and they are very much action-driven and spy-orientated. Lorenzo is one of the best producers out there, ” says Townsley. “From the very, very beginning, we were all on the same page, Erik, Lorenzo and I and Peter. It’s been a fun experience and I’ve learned a lot from them both because I came from a documentary background,” says Townsley.
Howsam recalls their initial read of the script nearly eight ago: “What was so unique and original about this piece of material is, yes, we’ve seen spy movies and spy thrillers but this had a female protagonist at the center of it, and it was so well-realized and rich and well done that we said, ‘look, we have to be a part of this.'”
Once on board, the two contributed to the further development of the script alongside Townsley and O’Brien and brought in their specific brand of expertise, garnered from producing some of the biggest action films of the past decade.”I think that we are able to add a layer to the movie that maybe didn’t exist before,” says Howsam.
While fleshing out the Unlocked script and its world of paranoia, subterfuge, double-crosses and unexpected narrative turns, the filmmakers looked to espionage classics such as Carol Reed’s 1947 noir The Third Man and Sydney Pollack’s conspiracy thriller Three Days of the Condor as well as more contemporary additions to the spy film pantheon, including the films of the Bourne franchise.
“The spy genre has become more of a good guy/bad guy genre and this is really in a sense going back to — I guess the antecedents might be The Third Man — where you believe what the world is and you’re wrong, and you believe who you can trust and you’re wrong. So I think that’s where this is going to be really challenging and fun for the audience and feel fresh to the audience because it’s not how a lot of these thrillers are going to do it,” says di Bonaventura.
While unlocking a courier who works for a terror cell, Alice discovers that there’s a biological warfare plot underway and it’s up to her to stop it at all costs. To represent this potential threat accurately, O’Brien engaged in extensive research and consulted various experts, including the FBI’s WMD task force for the city of Los Angeles, which gave him perspective on what steps would taken in response to an actual biological attack. “We feel like what we’re representing in the film is a scenario that none of us want to happen but those are the stakes of the movie; she has to stop this,” emphasizes O’Brien.
Along with the FBI, a CIA advisor and an ex-Navy Seal, all weighed in on the more technical sections of the script and helped O’Brien to nail the vernacular necessary to imbue the film with the authenticity he sought to deliver. “I had the right people to help me,” he says.
Although the script went through several incarnations over the years, the core of the story always remained the same. “Ironically, as frustrating as it has been that it took this long, it’s more topical today than when Peter first wrote it,” says di Bonaventura. “It’s funny because sometimes scripts get old because the subject/times change. In this case, times changed and just made it all the more real and present.”
An eerie testament to this topicality is the distinct similarity between the deadly Marburg Virus, the biological agent which this film explores, and the Ebola Virus, which devastated West Africa in 2014. “The Ebola outbreak certainly is tragic and it’s just coincidental that the public is being educated about what these organisms can do if there’s an outbreak or if they’re unleashed purposefully on people. It’s a very scary scenario but it is one that’s a very real concern,” says O’Brien.
Also coinciding with the final phase of the script’s development was the increased prevalence of terror attacks in recent years. “We really sort of ripped it from the headlines of real life and I think when people do see the movie they’ll be able to relate to it because it does exist in a world that is out there right now. It’s not that it’s a scary place but our country needs to be vigilant and, thank God, there are people like Alice in the world protecting us in these situations,” says Howsam.
Finding The Financing
Howsam says: “On a movie like this, which is made outside of the studio system, you need to have the right financing.” This the Unlocked team found via Claudia Bluemhuber, CEO and Managing Partner of Silver Reel, who serves here concurrently as financier and producer. Di Bonaventura recalls, “she just had a real passion for the story and she immediately got what we were trying to do. So it made it sort of an easy decision for us.”
Bluemhuber, renowned for seeking out, financing and producing uniquely elevated, art-house material such as the BAFTA-nominated film Under the Skin starring Scarlett Johansson, was certain that Unlocked was a fitting addition to the Silver Reel slate. “It’s a very, very smart thriller and we loved the whole package,” she enthuses.
Bluemhuber also welcomed the opportunity to produce alongside Townsley, di Bonaventura and Howsam and is a true admirer of the sheer tenacity Townsley exhibited while shepherding this project from script to screen. “Alice is Georgina’s idea,” she compliments. “It’s to her credit that Alice is Alice and that this movie is where it is right now.”
Bluemhuber, renowned for seeking out, financing and producing uniquely elevated, art-house material such as the BAFTA-nominated film Under the Skin starring Scarlett Johansson, was certain that Unlocked was a fitting addition to the Silver Reel slate. “It’s a very, very smart thriller and we loved the whole package,” she enthuses.
Bluemhuber also welcomed the opportunity to produce alongside Townsley, di Bonaventura and Howsam and is a true admirer of the sheer tenacity Townsley exhibited while shepherding this project from script to screen. “Alice is Georgina’s idea,” she compliments. “It’s to her credit that Alice is Alice and that this movie is where it is right now.”
Securing The Right Director
“Once we got the script into a great place, it was just a matter of trying to get the right elements and putting them together to get the movie finally made,” says Howsam. Naturally, one such element was securing the ideal director for the film. With a stunning filmography which spans five decades and a multitude of genres, the award-winning, ever-versatile Michael Apted is at the helm of Unlocked.
From their first meeting with the legendary Apted, the producers were moved by the clarity of his vision of the film. “When we spoke to him, he was just incredibly smart about the script and what he wanted to do with it and how he envisioned the movie, and we knew we were in great hands,” remembers Howsam. “When we met, he had such a vivid vision of the movie and of the characters and of Alice. He just blew us away with his enthusiasm for the movie,” seconds Bluemhuber.
Apted has demonstrated repeatedly that one of his many directorial strengths is working with female leads. Under his deft direction, Coal Miner’s Daughter garnered Sissy Spacek an Academy Award for Best Actress while Gorillas in the Mist featured one of Sigourney Weaver’s top performances to date. As Unlocked is a female-driven thriller, the producers were certain that Apted could evoke a similarly bold performance from lead actress Rapace. “Here was a movie where we’re not trying to reinvent the spy genre but we have a female in the center of it. So this is a director who could really draw that performance out of it,” explains Howsam.
Although Apted had directed an installment of the James Bond franchise in the past, he welcomed working with di Bonaventura and Howsam given their more consistently action-oriented filmographies. “I think he was excited to work with us because we’ve done a lot of these bigger action movies and we know how to build a film and produce a film with those elements. So I think there was this opportunity to kind of marry our strengths together on this film, and it’s really worked out well,” says the latter. “I think it’s also interesting to work with a director who has a documentarian background, someone who’s able to bring a vitality and capture real life in a way.”
Apted views Unlocked as somewhat of a character piece with Orlando Bloom, Michael Douglas, Toni Collette and John Malkovich’s characters each having their own independent impact on Alice’s journey. “I think that one of the great strengths of this movie is that we introduce characters throughout the film and we populate it with these great names and they obviously play a big piece in the plot of this movie at the same time,” says Howsam.
“It’s fantastic, a little surreal and truly thrilling just to see something come to life in the eyes of the director with his vision the director of photography with the way it looks actors breathing life into these characters for the first time,” says O’Brien.
Casting
In casting the masterful CIA interrogator, the filmmakers sought an actress who could deeply inhabit the role and whose physicality the audience would buy within that role. Having already proven her acting abilities and physical mettle to audiences around the world with her unforgettable turns as Lizbeth Salander in the Millenium Trilogy and Elizabeth Shaw in Prometheus, Naomi Rapace fit the bill perfectly.
Rapace found the script to be well-written and unpredictable and relished the opportunity to play a character as complex and multi-layered as Alice. “She’s a CIA agent, she wants to do good and then something happened a couple of years ago that she can’t let go of, that she can’t get over so she’s kind of reversed into this corner of safety when the movie starts,” she says. “So this film is an action thriller with all the elements — it’s a spy movie, a thriller — but also it has for me, a deeper level of someone coming back to life and kind of awakening.”
O’Brien describes Alice as the typical reluctant hero. “But the reluctance is more about someone who’s had an incident in her past where she feels that she’s failed. In fact, she’s extraordinarily gifted as a CIA officer, extraordinarily smart, very good with weapons and combat and guns. But she has withdrawn somewhat into a safer position within the CIA and now she’s called up for this particular assignment. She does it reluctantly and in doing the assignment and interrogating this prisoner and unlocking this critical piece of information, she suddenly finds herself back on the front lines of her profession. It’s not a place she wants to be again but she rises to the occasion. So over the course of the movie all of her sort of dormant skill set comes out and we see, wow, this is what this woman is capable of,” he says.
After such a long period of development, O’Brien was understandably delighted to see filming underway and his characters finally coming to life. “The character is only halfway there with my words maybe but what Noomi’s done with Alice, I couldn’t be happier about it. She’s absolutely perfect, and I really can’t see anyone else in that role,” lauds O’Brien.
Academy Award nominee Toni Collette plays hard-charging M15 Agent Emily Knowles. Although the part of Knowles was originally written for a man, Apted decided that re-conceiving the role for an actress would put a fresher, more unique spin on it and on the key relationship between Knowles and Alice.
“It’s so exciting to have such a balanced and strong female character at the centre of this story meeting the boys head on. And I love the relationship Noomi’s character shares with mine. It’s a supportive, smart, healthy, complex, caring connection. I play a mentor of sorts — a formidable and grounded woman who has given up so much for the job she loves,” says Collette.
“Knowles and Alice represent two people from different agencies and different governments who are working together and oftentimes without official knowledge of their superiors. There’s a lot of trading of information between governments and Alice and Knowles have developed a friendship where they trust each other in that way,” explains O’Brien.
“When you’re making a movie, you hope that you’re able to populate the movie with great character actors and these great actors, however big the role is or however small it is, and I think in this movie we absolutely were able to do that. And there’s an enormous talent pool out there that you’ve just got to search for, and if you can put it together in the right way, it will make the movie that much better,” says Howsam.
“It’s a story about a woman who has lost trust in herself and during the spy intrigue and the machinations and in the plot she comes to find herself again. And in that becomes re-empowered and reinvested and actually now is able to stop this horrific thing from recurring,” elaborates di Bonaventura.
“This should be a thrill ride, people say the edge of your seat, I always think it’s more about holding on to your seat. It should be a white-knuckler and it should keep you guessing through a lot of it because it’s very intricate. I think what’s interesting about it is it’s really an intelligent script and it’s really designed to be an entertaining movie so those two things don’t always go hand in hand in our business and in this case they do. So I think people are going to enjoy it and it’s also going to make them think, says di Bonaventura.