Katie Aselton And Mark Duplass Team For Indie Thriller 'Black Rock,' Starring Lake Bell And Kate Bosworth

Let's hear it for film as the people's medium! Katie Aselton, who made The Freebie, is directing and starring in a thriller called Black Rock, written by her husband, Mark Duplass (Baghead, Cyrus). The film is about "what happens when three childhood friends meet for a weekend getaway on an isolated island and discover that they have company." The cast is pretty much set, and also includes Lake Bell, Kate Bosworth, Jay Paulson, Anslem Richardson and Will Bouvier. But this isn't a big-budget deal; as the involvement of Mark Duplass would suggest, it's a pretty small film that comes from a personal space. And it is looking for audience help to take the final step to creation.

Katie Aselton explained the basic approach to the movie, saying,

I grew up watching classic suspense films and have long had the idea of making a girl-based thriller where the threat to the characters is very real, and the audience is left with the terrifying thought 'this could happen to me.

If the movie sounds good, head over to Kickstarter, where the producers are crowd-sourcing some of the funding. On that Kickstarter page, Katie Aselton says,

And [Mark and I] started talking about this idea I had of this girls' trip gone awry... how I wanted it to be brutal and ugly and real... and beautiful.  Then we looked around and it struck us:  What better place to set these girls in a life and death struggle than on the rocky, harsh, yet utterly breathtaking coast of Maine?  And that's where BLACK ROCK was born.  Mark flew back to L.A. and, thanks a to blizzard-induced 12-hour layover, landed with a rough draft of the script.

Here's a video that explains things a little more, and is pretty charming to boot, as Aselton and Duplass explain that most of the point of the Kickstarter funding is to raise money to shoot on the new Arriflex Alexa camera system that is getting raves left and right (and convincing Roger Deakins to shoot digital):

Side note: I can't hear the title of this film without thinking of the band Blackrock, who served up some amazingly kickass funky shit (like this) in the mid '70s. If you like that track, dig up the bootleg comp 'Chains and Black Exhaust.' You won't be disappointed.