Severance
Short description
A group of employees from Palisade Defence, an international weapons manufacturer, is sent on a company-backed team-building trip to a remote lodge in eastern Europe. The getaway the staff expected does not materialise, and the colleagues instead find themselves hunted in the forest by attackers with a taste for violence. Their corporate bonding exercise turns into a struggle to stay alive.
Christopher Smith directed and co-wrote the film with James Moran, following his 2004 debut Creep and preceding Triangle, Black Death and later titles. The cast includes Danny Dyer, Laura Harris, Tim McInnerny, Toby Stephens, Claudie Blakley and Babou Ceesay. It is a German, British and Hungarian co-production.
Released in 2006, the film mixes comedy with horror and thriller elements across a 96-minute runtime and took about 6 million dollars worldwide. On IMDb it holds 6.4 from roughly 43,000 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 6.3 from a much smaller pool of around 690. A critics' rating of 6.5 from 91 reviews places it slightly above the audience scores, suggesting a genre piece that reviewers received somewhat more warmly than general viewers did.
What's left behind the scenes
- The bus driver was played by stuntman Shándor Boros, who is of Hungarian nationality. According to director and screenwriter Christopher Smith, Hungarian stuntmen were much less concerned about the safety of the film crew than their British counterparts. Boros was instructed to maintain a speed of 55 km/h, but he decided that wouldn't be enough and accelerated to 80 km/h, resulting in the script having to be rewritten and the actors' injuries being adjusted to match the high-speed crash, making them more severe. During the stunt, Boros himself lost consciousness from the impact.
- Laura Harris (who played Maggie) listened to depressing music before filming specifically so she wouldn't appear in front of the camera in too good a mood, which she was constantly in.
- The pool full of fallen leaves into which Andy Nyman's character fell was actually a fountain only a few centimeters deep.
- Preparing for filming, Danny Dyer, the actor playing Steve, worked out at the gym for 10 weeks.
- Casting lasted for 4 months.
- The CRM-114 anti-personnel mine is a reference to the CRM-114 radio receiver from Stanley Kubrick's science fiction comedy "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" (1963).
- In the scene where the character played by Andy Nyman steps into a bear trap, a stunt double with an amputated leg was used.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
