Inspired by true events, Killer Elite is a new action-adventure spy film that follows Danny (Jason Statham), one of the world's most skilled special-ops agents. Lured out of self-imposed exile, Danny reassembles his crack team of operatives to execute a near-impossible mission of retribution- to rescue his former mentor and partner Hunter- (Robert De Niro). Together they must penetrate the highly feared and respected military unit, the British Special Air Service (SAS), to take down a rogue cell of soldier assassins and their leader Spike (Clive Owen) before their actions
create a global crisis.

KILLER ELITE'S whirlwind journey of action hurtles across the globe: from Mexico to Australia, from Paris and London to Oman and Wales. The film is based on Ranulph Fiennes' controversial nonfiction bestseller 'The Feather Men'.

ABOUT THE PRODUCTION: HOW IT ALL STARTED
"Certainly it's an action film, certainly it's a thriller, but these characters are based on people who existed, and what we're interested in exploring is the humanity of the characters. I think that's what drew people like Robert De Niro, Clive Owen and Jason Statham to the film."
Director, Gary McKendry

Self-described, "World's greatest living explorer," Sir Ranulph Fiennes, British adventurer and author, wrote the controversial novel The Feather Men in 1991. Based on events witnessed by Fiennes during his career in the British Army and the SAS, The Feather Men is a gripping and thrilling story of ex-SAS soldiers going up against the world's most elite operatives in a murderous revenge-seeking operation.
When a friend handed Gary McKendry a copy of the Fiennes book, The Feather Men, he had little idea that this would start him on a journey that would take almost seven years to come to fruition. But the whole process started with the controversial, non-fiction Fiennes book.

THE BACKGROUND TO A CONTROVERSIAL NOVEL

THE SOURCE: The Feather Men by Sir Ranulph Fiennes
Ranulph Fiennes was born in 1944 and educated at Eton. He served with the Royal Scots Greys before joining the SAS, becoming the youngest Captain in the British Army. In 1968 he joined the Army of the Sultan of Oman and in 1970 he was awarded the Sultan's Bravery Medal. Since 1969 Ranulph Fiennes has been at the forefront of many expeditions. Dubbed the 'World's Greatest Living Explorer' by the Guinness Book of Records, he has worked to raise significant amounts for various charities, and in 1993 Sir Ranulph Fiennes was awarded an OBE for Human Endeavour and Charitable Services.
Delving deeply into the grisly aspects of one of Britain's dirtiest little wars and the repercussions of the assassinations and political scandal that followed, the book also detailed the existence of a secret society of powerful ex-SAS officers whose charter was to go to any lengths necessary to protect their fellow SAS soldiers, past and present.
Fiennes, who served in the SAS, vouched for the authenticity of the events portrayed in the book. But his contention was that the elite Feather Men had covered up the contract killing of the SAS soldiers by making them appear as accidental deaths; and since all details of the SAS' role in the Omani war are still highly classified by the British government, there has been no way to totally authenticate many of the events portrayed as facts in the book.
Without ever being able to distinguish between the factual and fictionalized, Australian Writer Matt Sherring and Director Gary McKendry collaborated closely to make a film based on known factual events but dramatized and condensed for the big screen. McKendry notes, "We don't know if every part of this happened or not. But I do know it's a fantastic story. And we set out to make a great film.

THE SCREENPLAY: KILLER ELITE by Matt Sherring
The shadowy and complex nature of the story based on the events in Fiennes' book led director Gary McKendry and writer Matt Sherring to begin their rethinking of the book with, of all things, the ending.
Sherring explains: "When you read the book, Fiennes doesn't tell you what happened to Danny or to Spike in the end. Where they went, what they did just wasn't finalized. We felt you couldn't get to the end of the film and say 'Well, we don't know what happened to these people we've been following for two hours.'"
Adapting such a complex storyline for the screen brought its own difficulties. Sherring says: "It's quite a long, complex book, with a time-span of seventeen years, so we really had to condense it." McKendry adds that it was a matter of "trimming down the number of characters, the number of locations, the number of victims, and the number of incidents. It really was about simplification  while keeping the excitement of a very complicated story."

THE INTERNATIONAL STORY BECOMES AN AUSTRALIAN FILM
Enter Omnilab Media, Australia and New Zealand's largest independently owned media company. Having already produced a string of successful films, they were developing a roster of new international films when KILLER ELITE came to their attention through producers Joni Sighvatsson and Steve Chasman. Omnilab Executive Producers Christopher Mapp and Matthew Street were impressed with the passion of the producers and the creative take on the material by McKendry. Omnilab had also worked successfully before with Chasman and Jason Statham, so everything  just felt right about this project from the beginning. Executive Producer Christopher Mapp says: "Having had such a success with Jason Statham and Steve Chasman on the film The Bank Job, we were looking for another great film to do together. We were excited about Gary's passion and vision for the film, and when Jason confirmed he was committed to playing Danny we then began looking at securing the best actors to play the roles of Spike and Hunter, which turned out to be Clive Owen and Robert De Niro."
After securing the rights to the project, Omnilab's production arm, Ambience Entertainment,  brought on Australian Producers Michael Boughen and Tony Winley.
Much of the casting came from the Australian talent pool, with Dominic Purcell, Yvonne Strahovski,
Ben Mendelsohn, Aden Young, and up-and-coming talent Firass Dirani all taking key roles.

READ ABOUT THAT CAST AND THEIR CHARACTERS

THE REAL WORLD OF THE SAS
To recreate intimate details of a world that is as secretive, complex and finely tuned, as that of the SAS could not have happened without the actors and the director having special insight into this world. The actors were lucky to have consultants to take them into that world as part of their research.
Clive Owen learnt a lot about what it means to be in the SAS from those who know first-hand. He explains: "Well actually I know a few ex-SAS guys so I could pick their brains a bit and then I had a couple of meetings with an SAS consultant, a guy who had been in the SAS for twenty-five years.
He really explained the whole selection process of the SAS, which was fascinating. He told me that half of the people are eliminated in the first week of physical training. They've been chosen because they are the fittest, but when they are put through the process they are very quickly thrown out."
Through the process of writing the screenplay and directing the film, Gary McKendry also had  some invaluable advisors on hand to give the authenticity where it was needed. He says: "We talked to a lot of SAS and Navy Seal guys. It was interesting because they were from very different worlds, very different approaches, but wound up in the same place. We got some really great advisors who were crucial to get it right. Hopefully we got it right."

REAL ACTION THAT HURTS
KILLER ELITE is a story of deeply human themes: belonging, loss and redemption; but at the same time it is an exploration of men who are required to be extraordinary, to ask more of themselves than most of us ever need to. Gary McKendry ties the action scenes, so integral to the film's flow and story, to these deeper themes: "It was really important to me that there wasn't this big dividing line between drama and action. The key for me was keeping it real, keeping some truth in it. These characters are physical creatures but they're incredibly intelligent and the price they pay emotionally is quite deep."
Keeping it real meant a lot of the action is 'in camera', something that is becoming rare in contemporary action films. Producer Steve Chasman is thrilled that having such a talented cast allowed for this. "Because Jason and Clive are both so physically gifted, we wanted to try to do things that would really surprise the audience. A lot of movies these days, if you watch them, the cameras are shaking and all you see is a punch with a fist or a knee or an elbow and invariably it's always the stunt man and then they do a close up of the actor. In this film, for the majority of it, we see everyone in camera. Jason takes a lot of pride in that, and Clive does as well. Even Bob [De Niro] mixed it up, which is really exciting'.
Clive Owen is no stranger to action on-screen, and the type of work it involves is something he really enjoys. "There's something very satisfying about doing fights in movies because they are very, very specific. The lines of what you have to execute are very clear. It's like there are beats, and the precision and the objectives are really clear. It's different with dialogue because there's so many different ways you can interpret things but with a good fight, it's very clear what you've got to try and execute and I find that quite satisfying. I have a very big fight with Jason's character and   that took a lot of training. They had a brilliant stunt team on this, the best I have ever worked with to tell you the truth, and in terms of their discipline and the way they approach the fights. It is quite a process; it is something that you do have to prepare for. You can't just walk onto the set and start picking that sort of stuff up. It's a long fight. Even though it's only a few minutes in the movie, it's a long time to do a fight for that length and it did require a couple of hours a day for quite a few  weeks just getting ready for the fight scenes."

SETTING AN ACTION THRILLER IN THE 1980s
Being set in the '80s affected the overall look of the film as well as that of the individual characters, and also necessitated some careful location scouting. As director Gary McKendry says of the overall recreation of the period, "The single most important thing in this film was keeping it authentic. I had a vision at the start of this film with lots of hand-held camera flying around, very loose, but I can't do that because I move the camera here, I see a satellite dish, I move there, I see a parking meter, I move there I see a cell phone tower, it's not 1980 anymore. So we had to move the camera in a much more intimate way, it's still hand held, it's still little short zoom work, it still  has a certain spontaneity where actor leads and the camera is trying to keep up, but not quite to the extent I had initially wanted. But Simon Duggan at the helm made this work, he lit it not slick, not beautiful, he kept it real, and that was the key for me, was keeping it real, keeping some truth in it."

COSTUME
The costumes and the look of each character also had to fit the period in an authentic way, which in this case did not mean the style of the 1980s that immediately comes to mind. McKendry says, "People say 1980, but to these guys [the ex-soldiers]V it's 1972, maybe 1970. They don't know about what's 'in' or punk, or new wave, they don't know about New Romantics. They live in the world of bands like Slade and Sweet."

HAIR & MAKE-UP
Key hair and make-up was created by Oscar®-winner Paul Pattison who thrived on keeping the look of the film real. "The great thing about this project is that it is set in the early 1980s but we were designing something that wasn't theatrical, it wasn't going to be over the top '80s, it's not going to be [pop group] Wham. And luckily enough I was there in the 1980s so I knew exactly what was going on then. We were able to take twenty-seven different cast members and individually look at each character. It doesn't matter if they play for two days or fifty days on the shoot, we treated each person as a particular look. We kept that look quite understated but at the same time something that is a little bit interesting and a little bit left of centre but not over the top, and I think we've achieved that."
Working with each actor individually allowed for great attention-to-detail to get the look exactly right which, as a result, made it more of a collaborative process than on most films, as Paul explains. For Clive Owen this resulted in him appearing in the film, as he has never been seen before. His character Spike sports a very 1980s moustache that Clive grew for authenticity. Clive explains: "Well it's weird cause I kind of grew up in the 1980s so I feel close to it. I think Gary [McKendry]  and I are of the same sort of generation so there's a whole world which is quite familiar to me and there's lots of memories and lots of details that you remember. So it's very weird going into some of the sets because they've done a very excellent set design on this and it feels very period, it's not an 1980s fashion show with clothes and everything, it's very much broken down and to look as real as possible. I looked at pictures of the 1980s and everyone had moustaches, if you go back and look at soccer teams and any pictures from that period, moustaches were big then, so I felt I should go there."

LOCATIONS
The majority of the film was shot in Victoria, Australia, with filming also taking place in Jordan and Wales. Victorian locations doubled for London, Oman, or Paris, and director Gary McKendry used distinct colour palettes for each part of the world to help tell the story, although they are not all what you might expect. Gary says: "The story moves around in a lot of worlds. That was one of the   things I really liked about it. None of these worlds were familiar, we moved from Oman, to Australia to London to Paris so one of the things we were really conscious of was giving each world its own colour palette. Australia was a wet leaf, London was a purple bruise and the desert was a dry white bone. I think it just helps people understand they've moved to a different world really quickly and that was a brief to the production designers and to the DP as we were doing it. We lit it differently, we costumed it differently, we designed the sets differently."
A green Australia, however, is a different look to what is normally portrayed in films. McKendry continues: "We weren't going for the red, burnt Australian world that we usually see in movies, we were going for a sense of life. We wanted a sense that this was Danny's life, this is where you   come to, this is the future, the past is death so all this was about is life so we needed lots of life, lots of water, we needed flowers, we needed things that you wouldn't normally think of around him, the lead actor of an action film. We certainly got that in the Yarra Valley and that's where we shot Anne's house and that's where we built Danny's house. The locations in Australia were fantastic, quite unbelievable."
Australian producer Michael Boughen agrees. "There's such a diversity of locations in Victoria and we really did spend a lot of time searching out what we wanted. There are little street corners in Melbourne that look like Paris; there are streets that look like London. There's a lot of buildings here, the bluestone buildings, the cobbled streets. We can find remarkable things here in Victoria and in Melbourne in particular to reproduce those cities, if you shoot carefully. And of course, the film's set in the '80s, so in many ways, finding '80s London is even trickier, because it has developed so much. 1980s Paris is a little easier and the desert, well the desert's the desert. London was particularly easy according to Executive Producer Matthew Street because "Melbourne's streets, being based on a Victorian system, really look like the UK." Gary McKendry also points out that the London weather was there for the production too: "It was the wettest Melbourne winter in I think, ten years, which made shooting London a lot easier, a lot more friggin' miserable, but it made it easier. The skies look like London, the ground was shiny and wet, and so it helped."

GARY McKENDRY (Director)
Gary McKendry's short film Everything in This Country Must, with Joni Sighvatsson as Executive Producer, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film in 2005. Gary,  who spent much of 2003 shooting the film on location in Northern Ireland, clearly communicated his unique style of storytelling. The success of Everything in This Country Must set the scene for Gary to direct his first feature, KILLER ELITE.
Gary grew up in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. His experiences during the Troubles, that turbulent period of Northern Irish history, informed his approach to developing, writing and directing KILLER ELITE.
Gary graduated from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London with a degree in art and film. He began a successful career in advertising working as a storyboard artist, before moving to Australia where he worked as an art director. He later moved to New York City where he worked with ad agencies Chiat/Day, Ogilvy & Mather and Margeotes Fertitta.
Eventually McKendry branched out on his own, founding the company Go Film and directing award winning commercials for clients such as IKEA, Porsche, Heineken, NASDAQ, Budweiser and
DeBeers.

MATT SHERRING (Writer)
Matt was born and raised in country NSW, Australia. His formal education was at a boarding school for farmers, majoring in agriculture and rugby. Subsequently Matt had stints as a real estate  agent, PE teacher, portable toilet cleaner and finally in advertising. As an advertising writer he worked in top agencies in Sydney, Amsterdam and New York for clients such as MTV, Intel, CNN and Nike.
Over the last several years Matt has turned his focus to film, writing screenplays (including Killer Elite) with close friend director Gary McKendry

The Art of Adaptation

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