When we first talked about Kaare Andrews' Altitude I intimated that he, like Troy Nixey, are Canadian former comic book illustrators and great folks who represent the next wave of really phenomenal filmmakers as they've both stepped into the larger world of feature filmmaking. Troy's debut will be out in 2010 and you'll be hearing a lot more about that soon, and Kaare just made the trades with his sophomore effort, his first project as writer/director. It's called The Hunted and it sounds like Mr. Andrews is going to be pulling no punches.

First, the latest on Altitude from the man himself.

How's it coming?

Altitude is moving along quite nicely.  A real throw back to the old school Twilight Zone and I'm very proud of the work our actors did including Jessica Lowndes (CW's 90210), Julianna Guill (Friday the 13th), Ryan Donowho, Jake Weary and Landon Liboiron.  We've now locked edit and our climbing a mountain of VFX work.  Almost the entire movie takes place on a 7 seater plane and beside each of those seats are windows.  We have to put our digital storm behind those windows in almost every shot!  Not to mention a few other surprises that show up in the supernatural storm that swallows our 5 young friends.

What's the story with distribution?

We have Alliance Atlantis distributing in Canada but our producers are waiting for us to finish before attaching American distribution to try to get as much return as possible on their investment.  We're in a good position because we were a fully budgeted film without US distribution and have a little more flexibility than normal.  We probably won't be showing any footage until early 2010 I'd imagine.  There is a pesky little 'proof of concept' sales trailer floating around the internet that we created to help raise initial financing.  If you run into this PLEASE know that it was simply a cheap one day shoot we quickly created to sell the movie and doesn't really represent the final product.  We have an entirely different cast, plane and VFX.

And what is The Hunted about, now that we've heard of it in the trades with an amazing producer steering it?

The Hunted stars a young guy who has trained all of his life to become an assassin.  On his first assignment he is given a young girl as his target but can't bring himself to kill her.  Instead he abducts her and finds himself on the run from her bodyguards, his own clan of deadly killers and the very man that trained him.  This really is a simple, archetypal story that asks the question "what is a killer?".  What will separate this film from others in the genre is the execution (pun mostly not intended).  A level of lethal reality but on an operatic scale.  "If Blade Runner was a ninja movie".  I grew up on these movies and I believe I have a new way to do things and I can not wait to push this genre as hard as possible.

The film is being produced by the legendary Gale Anne Hurd. Kaare you lucky devil... how?

First let me say that Gale has produced two of my favorite films of all time; Terminator (the original) and Aliens.  She was one of the first producers I knew by name and I am so excited to be collaborating on THE HUNTED.  It was really Ben Roberts at Valhalla that opened the doors.  He was a fan of my comicbook work and was sent my screenplay.  In the meantime I randomly bumped into Gale on Facebook.  I introduced myself as the guy that was painting Hulk covers when she was putting together the first Hulk movie and asked if she wanted to take a look at some of my film work.  Yes the power of social networking helped put this film together.  I took a meeting in L.A. and we really seemed to be on the same page and agreed on the spot to work together.

As soon as we are rolling cameras CHUD will be my first guests on set.  Just don't forget to bring your raincoat... and it won't be for the weather.

The image in this article is the first piece of artwork available for the film, a conceptual piece by Kaare. Enjoy it and stay tuned for more as CHUD.com gears up to cover this little gem in the making.