Joel got some new headshots taken while in Vancouver.
We highly recommend Mark Brennan to you if you are in the Northwest. He's amazing.
From Next Movie:
Teaming up with an A-List producer or director for your very first starring role is not a bad way to start an acting career. Just ask Joel Courtney, the lead kid in J.J. Abrams' "Super 8," who's currently in the beginning stages of racking up every male tween role from here to the end of the Mississippi.
This is known as the "Hailee Steinfeld Effect."
Courtney will ride the success of the sci-fi coming of age tale into one of the most well-known youngster roles in history: Tom Sawyer. The actor will star in writer/director Jo Kastner's new adaptation of "Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn," reports Variety, which is gearing up to shoot this August.
The mischievous character is a creation of legendary American author Mark Twain and appeared in a handful of novels. Which stories Kastner's new movie will cover is unknown, but expect plenty of steamboats, white picket fences and Southern drawl.
The article also reveals that Courtney is in negotiations to join the supernatural thriller "The Healer." In the film, the young actor will play a disgruntled teen who joins his father on a camping trip on to have a run-in with otherworldly forces.
Courtney gained a lot of leverage from his role in "Super 8" and we expect "Tom Sawyer" and "The Healer" to be only the beginning of his lengthy career. So, seriously -- what movie can he do with Hailee Steinfeld?
From Variety:
"Super 8" star Joel Courtney got more adventure than he bargained for in J.J. Abrams' monster movie and now he's hungry for more, as the 15-year-old thesp has entered negotiations for two indies, "Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn" and "The Healer."
Jo Kastner is writing and directing the adaptation of Mark Twain's classic tale, which will find Courtney playing Tom Sawyer, a mischievous troublemaker in search of endless adventures in 1850s Missouri.
Kastner and Marcus Weinhart are producing the pic, which is scheduled to shoot this August in Bulgaria.
After that, Courtney will segue to "The Healer," which Giorgio Serafini ("Game of Death") is writing and directing.
Story follows an ailing father who takes his two teenage kids into the woods to renew the bond they shared before a divorce. The trio are soon swept into a supernatural adventure in a haunted forest.
Courtney will play a rebellious youth who has grown up resenting his father. Just as he begins to warm up to his estranged dad, an apparent tragedy threatens to separate them forever and he's left trapped in limbo between the living world and the afterlife.
Susan Johnson and Giuseppe Pedersoli are producing "The Healer," which is skedded to start production this September in North Carolina.
Isn't Larry Fong amazing!
This is about my brother (Caleb Courtney's) upcoming film "Sol". From Wired:
It’s not easy to re-create an alien planet on a shoestring budget, but Sol director Ben Carland gives it a shot in the trailer for his new indie sci-fi saga.
The teaser for Sol sets up the movie’s premise: Glory-seeking teenagers from Earth compete in the “Sol Invictus” survivalist contest but get in over their heads when they wind up on the wrong piece of alien turf. Cue the eerie desert-horizon shots. Light-years from home, the competitors now must contend with menacing off-screen forces.
Carland, leader of North Carolina creative group The Obsidian Collective, is seeking distribution for the project through the Sol website.
“Set in the distant future on a hostile alien planet, [Sol] follows a group of ambitious young adults as they embark upon the prestigious Sol Invictus competition in a quest to win fame and glory,” says the site. “The rules of the game are simple but dire: Each of Earth’s finest Academies sends their best and brightest to a remote planet in a race against the rest. The first team to pinpoint, out of all the stars in the sky, which one is Earth’s faraway sun — Sol — is the winner. But no one goes home until the games are won.
“A glorious life awaits the lucky few who win, and many have died at the hands of their peers along the way with no questions asked. But visions of victory crumble as the teams are marooned on the wrong planet with most of their teammates missing — along with all of their equipment. What starts as a game for glory soon descends into a race for survival as former enemies must band together in the bleak hope of surviving long enough to win.”
From the NY Post:
I have a feeling in 20 years we'll look back on Joel Courtney's impossibly adult yet utterly age-appropriate performance in "Super 8" with the same "remember when this megastar was so young" reverence we save for Drew Barrymore in "E.T."
While much ado has been made over the special effects in J.J. Abrams' sci-fi exravaganza, I believe it is the young actors who have the most special effect on the film, letting the audience experience this awe-some adventure through their eyes. I caught up with Joel to find out what it's been like now that America knows the "Super" secret!
Check out the entire interview over at the NY Post.