Focus Features has released the first trailer for Stillwater, a new thriller from Academy Award winning director Tom McCarthy and starring Matt Damon and Abigail Breslin. Unlike Leonardo DiCaprio, Damon is actually a little unrecognizable in the role, playing an American oil-rig roughneck from Oklahoma. In the film Damon’s character must travel to Marseille to visit his estranged daughter, in prison for a murder she claims she did not commit. Confronted with language barriers, cultural differences, and a complicated legal system, Bill builds a new life for himself in France as he makes it his personal mission to exonerate his daughter. Check out the trailer below!
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Directed by McCarthy (Spotlight, Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made) who co-wrote the script with Marcus Hinchey, Thomas Bidegain, and Noรฉ Debrรฉ, Stillwater will debut in theaters on July 30. The film was shot on location both in the Sooner State and in France, with McCarthy previously revealing to Entertainment Weekly about it and how talking to people from Oklahoma helped shape the film. “Matt and I started going [to Oklahoma] early on to get a taste of the place and the people and spending time with roughnecks, in particular,” McCarthy said. “(It) really opened up their lives to us, and their worlds and their families. They were incredibly instrumental in helping us shape the story.”
Like so many other films over the last year, Stillwater has been delayed and removed from the schedule from its original premiere date back in the fall of 2020. In the end though the delay might have lead to better work on the final product as McCarthy revealed they would pause their post-production work during the pandemic and come back to it periodically.
“We shut [post-production] down and put it down, revisited it, shut it down again, and then opened it up about a month ago,” McCarthy added. “Whenever you can get away from a film like that, and you approach it with fresh eyes, you have the ability to make positive changes to it. I think we made a number of changes to it, which really impacted the movie, but it feels done. It feels baked now.”
Stillwater is set to debut in theaters on July 30. The film has stiff competition on its opening date with both Disney’s Jungle Cruise movie starring The Rock and Emily Blunt, and A24’s new fantasy-thriller The Green Knight with Dev Patel scheduled to arrive on that date.
