One Night With The King - New Website and Trailer

UPDATE: My review for this film is published here.

After two years of delays, it finally looks like Esther movie One Night With the King is going to be released on the 13th October. And at last someone has given the official website some much needed care and attention, and they have certainly made up for lost time.

First up there is the trailer, which makes the sets look vast and impressive. There are also a good range of photo stills, of all the various actors, but the real bonus are the 4 featurettes. It's fairly standard practice these days to film some of these as promos for a film which then make good bonus material when it comes to releasing the DVD. The first two are fairly standard in this regard. They're hosted by Tommy Tenny, who in addition to writing the novel this is based on seems to be fairly involved with the adaptation project as well. Tenny intereviews a couple of the main actors, Tiny Lister in the first one, and Luke Goss in the second. Lister is playing Hegai, and he cuts an imposing figure. That said, he is the deepest voiced Eunuch I've come across.

The best featurette is the 3rd, dubbed "Timelapse". Basically it shows the set being built in fast forward. It's the first time I've seen this done for a film set, and the size of the set makes it quite interesting. Lastly we end with a scene from Dupont's home church as she is told she's been chosen to play Esther. This scene kind of makes me wonder about life imitating art, as Dupont must have gone through a period of preparation hoping to be chosen to play the role of someone who is herself chosen from amongst many young women.

Elsewhere on the website there is a press pack with a bit more information. We learn the film was made in India. I like the fact that they've gone somewhere other than Morocco, which is where everybody seems to go these days. Perhaps I'm imagining it, but it does seem to give the film a very different feel from so many other recent films. This is perhaps appropriate as whereas most of them are set in the Holy Land, this story is set in Persia.

One thing I cam across in the press pack which was slightly strange. One of the PDFs says "Not since the splendor of Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet has a romance of such epic proportion hit the theatres." Perhaps it's just me, but it seemed like an odd film to use as a point of comparison. That said I've never seen it, but then no-one has ever tried to convince me I should either.