Trailer
Plot summary
Dr. Lewis Shaler is a widower traveling to London at night with his son Max, planning to leave the boy with his grandparents while he reports to the hospital where he works for victims of a major accident. Max's spilled coffee lands on the coat of Sarah Barwell, a fellow passenger, and the two adults fall into conversation. Sarah watches over Max while Lewis sleeps. He wakes to find the train running past its stops. Outside the window he glimpses a man in a high-visibility jacket walking along the carriages, and another man crawling across the tracks. The train guard is gone, and the driver answers the intercom only to ask how many passengers remain aboard. Lewis and the passengers still on the train, Peter Carmichael, Jan Klimowski and Elaine Middleton, look for a way off.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Last Passenger (2013)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Director Omid Nooshin and his producers made a £500 trailer to attract backers, filming on a heritage train on loan from the Bluebell Railway in Sussex. That microbudget promo was instrumental in attracting the backing of Pathé, the British Film Institute and Pinewood Studios.
- The 4x3 Alexa had not been released at the time, so Last Passenger had to be shot with anamorphic lenses on a 16x9 sensor, making it one of the first and only productions released theatrically to use 2:1 anamorphics that way.
- A major creative choice was to morph animal sounds, among them lions, tigers and cobras, with the recorded train sounds to give the locomotive an animalistic quality.
- Nooshin and producer Zack Winfield traveled to Wellington to meet Weta Workshop special effects head Richard Taylor, an avid train fanatic who supported the script, but budget constraints made shooting in New Zealand unfeasible. All the digital effects shots went instead to Tim Smit, the Dutch artist who had worked on the £500 trailer.
