Amazon’s teen filmmaker will attend FLIC
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POLSON – At the age of 17, Jonathan Perry has become the youngest director on any major streaming service with his film, SUBNIVEAN, which recently debuted on Amazon Prime to critical acclaim and is set to screen at film festivals worldwide.
Four years earlier, Perry began his career as a screenwriter from his hometown of Sandusky, Ohio, selling around forty short scripts through online message boards to the tune of nearly $10,000 in total. When he was offered a large sum for the rights to his short script SUBNIVEAN, the young filmmaker saw his chance to break into the film industry by adapting it himself.
Many told him the script was too ambitious, even too dangerous for such a young writer-director to attempt, but driven to bring SUBNIVEAN to the screen Perry contacted hundreds of professionals, eventually finding a pair of producers to help make his vision a reality. The film was shot on a $22,000 budget – primarily funded by Perry himself – with a crew consisting of students from local universities. After filming wrapped in December of 2018, Perry’s producers wrote a nine-page appeal to Amazon, who accepted the film and formed a partnership with Perry soon after.
The film is described as follows: “After a vicious chase home from gathering firewood, an innocent boy unknowingly leads his brother to fall through an isolated pond. The boy has to accept and use his twisted hallucinations of hatred as his only hope to break the ice and save his brother in time or die trying.”
Still hard at work on SUBNIVEAN, Perry doesn’t plan on taking any breaks after the Amazon release. For his next project, the now 18-year-old filmmaker has signed on with a principal Hollywood director and union members for his upcoming film, set to be released in 2022 with a starting budget of $1.5 million dollars. Jonathan is also developing “Project X7,” which is planned to launch digitally in 2021. Through an interview with filmmaker Alex Ferrari, Perry was able to get in touch with Steven Spielberg, who has expressed interest in the project.
SUBNIVEAN will be playing at the Flathead Lake International Cinemafest on Jan. 24 at 8 p.m., followed by a Q&A featuring Jonathan Perry. A FLIC encore will also feature SUBNIVEAN on Jan. 26 at 7 p.m. Tickets are available at http://www.flicpolson.com/tickets/. To get an exclusive look at Perry’s SUBNIVEAN, search for it on Amazon Prime Video.
