Franklyn (2008)

Franklyn is a 2008 British film written and directed by Gerald McMorrow in his feature debut. Produced by Jeremy Thomas, the film stars Ryan Phillippe, Eva Green and Sam Riley. Filming took place in London in the fourth quarter of 2007. Franklyn held its world premiere at the 52nd London Film Festival on 16 October 2008. The film was released in the United Kingdom on 27 February 2009.

Split between the parallel realities of contemporary London and the futuristic metropolis of Meanwhile City, Franklyn follows the tales of four characters. Jonathan Preest (Ryan Phillippe) is a masked vigilante who won't rest until he finds his nemesis, Duplex Ride’s dangerous leader-The Individual. Emilia (Eva Green) is a troubled young art student whose rebellion may turn out to be deadly. Milo (Sam Riley) is a heartbroken twentysomething yearning for the purity of first love. Peter (Bernard Hill) is a man steeped in religion, searching desperately for his missing son amongst London's homeless.

The film begins in "Meanwhile City", but later moves into contemporary London for the finale.

Writer-director Gerald McMorrow wrote the original science fiction script Franklyn for his feature debut, which depicts a similar dystopia to his 2002 short Thespian X. In October 2006, actor Ewan McGregor was cast into the lead role of the film, which was slated to begin production in summer 2007. However, McGregor broke his leg in a biking accident in February 2007 doing the second Long Way Round and was forced to leave the project. Actors Ryan Phillippe, Eva Green, and newcomer Sam Riley were cast in Franklyn in September 2007. Phillippe was the last to be cast in what McMorrow termed a 'now or never' situation, saying of their first meeting: "You have preconceptions about people... You expect the bleach-blond Californian kid and what you got was an incredibly erudite, brought-up-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks Philadelphia actor. When I met him we did not stop talking all afternoon."

McMorrow's visual inspiration for Meanwhile City came from the religious iconography he saw in Mexico City shopping malls. He later explained: "The idea was that if you're going to have a capital city based on religion, you've got somewhere like Florence or Rome and send somewhere like that three miles into the sky... Part of Preest's delirium and fantasies are based on the religion surrounding him and comics he read and films he saw. He sort of pieces together a jigsaw of his own delusions."Though Preest's mask was influenced by Rorschach in Watchmen, it was based on Claude Rains' Invisible Man.

Franklyn had a budget of £6 million, of which £1 million was provided by the UK Film Council through its Premiere Fund. Production began on 24 September 2007 in and around London and was completed by December 2007. Major locations included an East End bar and Greenwich Naval College, where many of the CGI sequences were shot. The film entered post-production by April 2008.McMorrow described his approach, "I used an atypical and off-kilter background, and told a story that wouldn't normally be told. The film was set around some tricky locations but we managed to shoot it."