Influences on Production

Our film has many different influences, which has effected plot, locations and our characters. Most influences and ideas came from action films, as obviously more of the ideas these films use would be applicable to our film as we are doing the same genre. The obvious influence to our film is the James Bond series of films, which links to our use of spies in our film.  However in terms of plot, the main influence would be the Bourne film series, which focuses on the undercover government spy work which is a major theme to our opening scene. This scene in particular from The Bourne Ultimatum influenced the part of our film where our main character has to try to escape his pursuer through the forest. The idea of the audience knowing where the lead character is but always second guessing where the pursuer is hiding is a big factor to this scene, and one we are aiming to use in our film as well. However, we aim to give our scene a more tension-filled and sinister tone.

Other action films also influenced our choice of location for our film. For example, the above scene also helped influence our decision to use a train station as a location in our film as we can see that they use a normal, everyday environment that the audience knows well in order to make them feel closer to the action as they can relate to what they see onscreen more. This is the reason we chose a train station as our first location to film at. The Hunger Games and Indiana Jones both use forest environments in several of their set-pieces, and after seeing this in our research it helped us decide to set our opening scene in a forest. The forest scene out of Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows also showed us how that environment can be used effectively in an action film. The forests normal tranquil and natural atmosphere is contrasted heavily with the action conventions of guns and explosions, or in our films case crossbows and blood.

Our main character being a man follows most action films, which tend to have a male in the lead role. The list of influences on this are endless but include more or less every Jason Statham, Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone film to date. Our main character being made to look professional and sophisticated despite the violence his job entails was inspired by the lead character in the 2007 film Hitman where, as you can see in the poster below, the lead is dressed in a suit and tie and wears black leather gloves. There were 2 main influences for our villain, the first being the character Daryl Dixon from the TV series The Walking Dead. He is shown to be an expert hunter and his signature weapon is a crossbow. Our villain also uses a crossbow and several shots in our film show him to be hunting our main character, making it easy to draw comparisons. The second influence for our villain is Bane out of The Dark Knight Rises. He has half of his face covered making him seem more mysterious as the audience doesn't fully know what he looks like and he is an expert fighter and killer, a trait we are trying to reflect onto our films villain. Our villain also has half of his face covered which is again, inspired by Bane as well as other movie villains who wear masks.