A feature version of the faux trailer Hobo with a Shotgun looks good to go with executive producer Niv Fichman, marking a change of direction for the multi-award-winning filmmaker behind Blindness and Passchendaele.

Director Jason Eisener and producer Rob Cotterill hope to go to camera on the grisly action comedy in Halifax before March 31.

‘The script is in a second draft,’ says Cotterill, who has been co-writing it for the past year with Eisener and John Davies. ‘For the first time we’re all three of us really excited about it. We wrote it backwards – we wrote the trailer and the goal was to make the movie follow the trailer.’

In March 2007, the one-minute trailer for a non-existent 1970s B-movie, Hobo with a Shotgun, won a trailer competition at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, beating out 300 other entries and garnering the attention of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez.

Alliance ordered 286 prints of the trailer to show across Canada before Tarantino/Rodriguez’s ode to ’70s exploitation flicks, Grindhouse. Eisener is expecting the Hobo with a Shotgun trailer to be a special feature on an as-yet-unreleased Grindhouse DVD. 

Former Alliance executive managing director Jim Sherry paired the Nova Scotia filmmakers with Fichman, who showed a lot of interest in the Hobo property. ‘He’s been helping us with the script,’ says Eisener, who recently showed his Christmas-themed horror short Treevenge at the Atlantic Film Festival and at Toronto’s After Dark festival. ‘He loved the trailer.’

Cotterill who, as first AD, just wrapped shooting the sequel to the Trailer Park Boys feature film in Dartmouth, NS, says he was initially a little surprised in Fichman’s interest, given his long history working on art-house projects, but was convinced by his enthusiasm upon meeting him.

‘He’s into making movies with people he believes in,’ says Cotterill. ‘He’s into people who are rabid about making movies. He sees we’re going to do whatever it takes.’