Industry | Film production |
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Founded | July 7, 1996 |
Founder | Chris Lowenstein |
Headquarters | , |
Key people | Chris Lowenstein (Executive director) |
Website | www |
Living Films is an international film production company based in Thailand. They have produced feature films, documentaries, commercials, and television series including The Hangover Part II, Shanghai (2010 film) , and Changeland . Its most recent projects include the Netflix / BBC TV series The Serpent (TV series) , the Netflix film Fistful of Vengeance , Ron Howard’s film Thirteen Lives , and episodes of Disney’s series Ms. Marvel (miniseries) .
Living Films was founded by Chris Lowenstein [1] in 1996. [2] Lowenstein studied film at Beloit College in Wisconsin [3] and began his career as a production assistant for Gus Van Sant working on the film My Own Private Idaho . He also worked as a production assistant for the Thailand filming of Heaven & Earth in 1993. [2] After similar work with the films Operation Dumbo Drop and The Quest , [3] Lowenstein opened his own production company in Chiang Mai. Living Films produces feature films, commercials, still-photo shoots and television projects. [4]
In 2006, during the filming of Bangkok Dangerous starring Nicolas Cage, the ruling government of Thailand was overthrown. [4] In 2013, A fire broke out on the set of No Escape (then called The Coup) starring Owen Wilson, Pierce Brosnan, and Lake Bell. There were no injuries to cast and production had wrapped for the day. The fire was thought to have been caused by faulty power supply. [5]
Year | Title [6] | Notes |
---|---|---|
2005 | Mysterious Island | Hallmark Channel TV movie |
2005–08 | Matrioshki | |
2006 | Blackbeard | Hallmark Channel TV movie |
2010 | 20 to One | |
Survivor | ||
2013 | The Hunters | Hallmark Channel TV movie |
2015 | The Legacy | |
2021 | The Serpent (TV series) | |
2022 | Ms. Marvel (miniseries) | |
Zachary Knight Galifianakis is an American comedian and actor. In film, Galifianakis played Alan in The Hangover trilogy (2009–2013). He hosted the Funny or Die talk show Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis (2008–2018). On television, he starred in the FX series Baskets (2016–2019), which he was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series in 2017.
Todd Phillips is an American filmmaker and film producer. Phillips began his career in 1993 and directed films in the 2000s such as Road Trip, Old School, Starsky & Hutch, and School for Scoundrels. He came to wider prominence in the early 2010s for directing The Hangover film series. In 2019, he co-wrote and directed the psychological thriller film Joker, based on the DC Comics character of the same name, which premiered at the 76th Venice International Film Festival where it received the top prize, the Golden Lion. Joker went on to earn Phillips three Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay, with his co-writer Scott Silver, his second, third, and fourth Academy Award nominations after also being nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay for Borat at the 79th Academy Awards.
The cinema of Thailand dates back to the early days of filmmaking, when King Chulalongkorn's 1897 visit to Bern, Switzerland was recorded by François-Henri Lavancy-Clarke. The film was then brought to Bangkok, where it was exhibited. This sparked more interest in film by the Thai Royal Family and local businessmen, who brought in filmmaking equipment and started to exhibit foreign films. By the 1920s, a local film industry was started and in the 1930s, the Thai film industry had its first "golden age", with a number of studios producing films.
Censorship in Thailand involves the strict control of political news under successive governments, including by harassment and manipulation.
The Hangover Part II is a 2011 American comedy film produced by Legendary Pictures and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. It is the sequel to the 2009 film The Hangover and the second installment in The Hangover trilogy. Directed by Todd Phillips, who co-wrote the script with Craig Mazin and Scot Armstrong, the film stars Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, Ken Jeong, Jeffrey Tambor, Justin Bartha, and Paul Giamatti.
The Hangover Part III is a 2013 American action comedy film and the sequel to The Hangover Part II (2011), both produced by Legendary Pictures and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. It is the third and final installment in The Hangover trilogy. The film stars Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, Ken Jeong, Jeffrey Tambor, Heather Graham, Mike Epps, Melissa McCarthy, Justin Bartha, and John Goodman with Todd Phillips directing a screenplay written by himself and Craig Mazin.
Home is a Thai drama film directed by Chookiat Sakveerakul. It was produced and distributed by Sahamongkolfilm International and released in Thailand on 19 April 2012. The film, set in Chiang Mai, consists of three continuous segments, each focusing on a group of characters whose relationships are revealed in the third segment. According to Chookiat, "Unlike my previous works, Home doesn't question any social problems. It's more of a personal film that pulls together my own memories."
The Hangover is a series of American comedy films created by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, and directed by Todd Phillips. All three films follow the misadventures of a quartet of friends who go on their road trip to attend a bachelor party. While all of the films find three of the four men on a mission to find their missing friend, the first two films focus on the events after the nights of debauchery before a party, respectively in Las Vegas and Bangkok, whereas the third and final film involves a road trip and a kidnapping in lieu of a bachelor party. Each film in the series focuses on how the friends deal with the aftermath of their antics, while they are being humiliated and occasionally physically beaten up at every turn. All three films were released from 2009 to 2013, and have grossed a collective total of $1.4 billion in the United States and worldwide.
Lost in Thailand is a 2012 Chinese comedy film directed and co-written by Xu Zheng and starring Xu Zheng, Wang Baoqiang, and Huang Bo. The film is about three Chinese men traveling in Thailand: two competing scientists searching for their boss, and a tourist eager to explore the country. The film is Xu's directorial debut.
Chris Bender is an American film producer whose beginnings were through developing and co-producing American Pie film series based on his and writer Adam Herz' own high school experiences. In November 1998, he established the management and production company Benderspink with partner J.C. Spink, a fellow alumnus of Bucknell University. Benderspink had a successful first look deal with New Line Cinema for over 15 years and a first look deal with Universal Cable Productions and before that, CBS Studios and Fox 21.
No Escape is a 2015 American action thriller film directed by John Erick Dowdle, who co-wrote the screenplay with his brother, Drew Dowdle. The film stars Owen Wilson, Lake Bell, and Pierce Brosnan, and tells the story of an expat engineer trapped with his family in an unidentified country in Southeast Asia during a violent uprising.
Hard Target 2 is a 2016 American action film directed by Roel Reiné, starring Scott Adkins, Robert Knepper, Temuera Morrison and Rona Mitra. It is a reboot of, or sequel to, the 1993 film Hard Target, which starred Jean-Claude Van Damme as a homeless cajun fighting a human hunting operation in New Orleans. The new film sees Adkins as a disgraced MMA champion who is unwittingly hired to act as prey in a deadly game of cat and mouse through the jungles of Myanmar.The film has no narrative connection to the first film.
Extraction is a 2020 American action thriller film directed by Sam Hargrave and written by Joe Russo, based on the graphic novel Ciudad by Ande Parks, Joe Russo, Anthony Russo, Fernando León González, and Eric Skillman. The film's cast features Chris Hemsworth, Rudhraksh Jaiswal, Randeep Hooda, Golshifteh Farahani, Pankaj Tripathi and David Harbour. In the film, an Australian black ops mercenary takes on a mission to save an Indian drug lord's kidnapped son in Dhaka, Bangladesh, but the mission goes awry when he is double-crossed.
The H Collective is a United States-based film finance, production, marketing and distribution company founded in 2017. The company has Chinese and American backers. THC is headquartered in Los Angeles, and it has offices in Shanghai and Berlin. THC's "first global title" was the 2019 film Brightburn, for which it was developing a sequel in 2023. THC acquired the rights to the XXX film series from Revolution Studios in 2018 to produce a fourth film, but faced a lawsuit from Weying Galaxy in 2020 over alleged misrepresentation and unauthorized transactions concerning those rights.
The Cave is a 2019 Thai action-drama film about the 2018 Tham Luang cave rescue in Chiang Rai Province, Thailand, written and directed by Tom Waller and co-produced by Waller and Allen Liu. The story is written from the points of view of several individuals involved in the rescue operation, and features cave diver Jim Warny and others as themselves. The film premiered at the 2019 Busan International Film Festival, and was released in Thailand on 21 November. It had a re-edited release in 2022 as Cave Rescue.
Philip Jablon is an American independent researcher, known for photographing and documenting historic movie palaces and stand-alone movie theaters in Thailand and neighbouring countries through his blog, the Southeast Asia Movie Theater Project.
Nicholas Andrew Simon, known professionally as Nicholas Simon, is a Hungarian-American film producer born in Rockford, Illinois, now currently residing in Bangkok, Thailand. He has been producing feature films, TV series, and commercials in Southeast Asia for two and half decades. For his work on City of Ghosts, A Prayer Before Dawn, Kong: Skull Island, Avengers: Infinity War, Simon has gained the title of “Hollywood’s man in Southeast Asia.”
Hunger is a 2023 Thai drama film directed by Sitisiri Mongkolsiri and written by Kongdej Jaturanrasamee. It stars Chutimon Chuengcharoensukying as Aoy, a street-food cook who is invited to join the fine-dining industry under the tutelage of the infamous Chef Paul, played by Nopachai Jayanama, with Gunn Svasti as Tone, a supportive sous chef. The film was announced by Netflix in 2022 as one of its six upcoming Thai original productions, and was released on the platform in April 2023. The film received mostly positive reviews, with an 87 percent rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. The Bangkok Post's reviewer Tatat Bunnag criticized the screenplay and dialogue, but concluded that "despite all the flaws, Hunger is still worth watching, especially for those who love intense drama and exotic settings."