Uruguayan commercials director Fede Alvarez must smiling today, as he’s just got one hell of a deal to make his first feature film. Variety reports that while most first-timers can expect $250,000 for their debut feature, Alvarez has just signed a seven-figure deal to turn his alien invasion pitch into a movie.
Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures is the company that has so much faith in the director that they’re willing to stump of that amount of cash, after seeing a five minute short film called Ataque de panico! that Alvarez made for only $500 dollars. The short is about an apocalytic robot invasion, and started causing a buzz after a link to it was featured on Kanye West’s blog. As a result, Hollywood agencies flew into a panic to sign him, and turn the man, who’d previously been on nobody’s radar, into a major director.
The film Ghost House has signed up for won’t be based on Alvarez’s short, and instead is said to be an original alien invasion idea that he pitched directly to Sam Raimi, although not much more is known about the plot than that. However Alvarez’s stylised robot invasion film certainly played a part in convincing Raimi that the Uruguayan director was a talent worth nuturing, and suggests the Spider-man director is planning to play the same mentoring role for Alvarez as Peter Jackson did for Neill Blomkamp on District 9.
Ghost House is now busy finding writers to turn the concept into a screenplay.