Academy Award winner Peter Ramsey, one of the three directors of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, has a new live-action feature in the works according to The Hollywood Reporter. The trade brings word that Ramsey wrote a script on spec and will now direct Blood Count, a “period vampire thriller” set to be produced by LeBron James and Maverick Carter’s SpringHill with Paramount distributing. Plot specifics were not disclosed but THR says the film is being described as a “noir social thriller” and is partially inspired by the life of Ramsey’s own father working as a jazz musician. The film is said to be set in 1950s L.A.
Ramsey’s history as a director is primarily in the animation realm. Before he became the first Black director to win the Best Animated Feature Oscar for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Ramsey was the first Black director of a bid-budget studio animated movie with Dreamworks’ Rise of the Guardians. Other projects in the works from Ramsey include Lost Ollie, a live-action/CG hybrid headed to Netflix in 2022. He has another live-action feature in the works as well though with Love in Vain, a biopic based on the life of Blues musician Robert Johnson. That film is also set up at Paramount.
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“I originally got into the business with live-action in mind,” Ramsey told Discussing Film last year in an interview. “I had no thought of animation at all. My heroes were Coppola and Kurosawa, it was all live-action. That was my aim. And it’s funny, in animation I’ve been lucky in that my sensibility works with the projects, like Rise of the Guardians which was this epic fantasy film that had grounding in a kind of storybook realism… It wasn’t like a cartoon, not to be pejorative, but it wasn’t that style of animation. It was something that was leaning much more heavily on influences from live-action movies, hopefully without just like blindly imitating them. So something like Rise of the Guardians or Spider-Verse later, both of those were in that thin sliver of projects that my sensibility would work in, but I’ve always wanted to get back to live-action and just finally climb that mountain. But I also love animation, I would never want to leave animation.”
Check back here for more info on Ramsey’s new movies as we learn more about them.
