What Do The Critics Say?

"An entire film set inside a large wooden coffin buried somewhere in Iraq could have been unbearable to watch. This is an extremely well crafted film that will keep you on the edge of your seat right up to the very last shot." Thomas Caldwell CINEMA AUTOPSY "Skillfully directed, shrewdly written, darkly funny, classically scored and acted right the fuck out of the park by a star not known for his dramatic chops." William Goss ORLANDO WEEKLY "You don't have to be claustrophobic to find the entire enterprise thoroughly upsetting." David Edawrds UK DAILY MAIL "At its best, Buried is a filmmaker's fondest double-dare challenge. And at its very best, it's considerably more." Stephen Whitty NEWARK STAR-LEDGER "If you think you're brave enough, and even if you aren't, Buried demands to be experienced on the big screen in all its suffocating, claustrophobic glory." Scott Henderson THE VINE "Impressively directed and superbly written, this is a genuinely suspenseful, emotionally engaging thriller with a terrific performance from Ryan Reynolds." Matthew Turner VIEW LONDON

"Whether you like it or not, Buried is a film that will stick in your memory. It may leave some audience members feeling just as claustrophobic as Paul Conroy." Matthew Toomey THE FILM PIE "A brilliantly twisted suspense thriller that would have made Alfred Hitchcock proud." Scott A Mantz ACCESS HOLLYWOOD "Buried does do a hell of a lot with very little." Patrick Kolan IGN MOVIES "With career-best work from Ryan Reynolds, Buried will find a loyal, devoted audience." Brian Tallerico MOVIE RETRIEVER "A brutally intense indie that commits to its bleak premise and doesn't back down. Tarantino will cackle as he watches." Nick De Semlyen EMPIRE MAGAZINE "Buried would make an awesome double bill alongside Inception, as opposite ends of the clever, concept-movie spectrum." Gary tHOMPSON PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS "This is as un-Hollywood a role as you could ever get, but Reynolds nails both the compressed physicality and fried psyche of his character with palpable precision." Leigh Paatsch HERALD SUN

The Inside Story There are big stories and small stories out there. The size of a story does not depend on the vastness of a landscape, the number of characters, or so-called production values. Is 1958 film "The Old Man And The Sea" a big story? Would it have been any bigger if Hemingway had added ten or twelve fishermen and thrown in a couple of extra sword fish? The size of a story cannot be measured in square feet and inches, but instead is dependent on one thing and one thing only: the story itself, whether what it tells us is interesting or not, whether it captures the spectator’s attention and holds it throughout, and whether it makes us want to know what’s going to happen next, or better still: need to know! Am I intrigued, am I fascinated, is time flying by without me even realizing? Am I so entirely caught up in the story that I have to pinch myself to remind myself it isn’t actually happening to me? If a story produces that kind of effect, then what we’ve got on our hands is a big story, a great story. If it doesn’t enthrall us in that way, then it hardly matters one way or another if there are legions of Orcs, an inter-stellar fleet and the whole of the Red Army fighting it out for control of planet earth, the effect will be disappointing, the story will be small. Thanks to a brilliant script by Chris Sparling,"Buried" is a big movie. It’s a race against time that captures our attention and keeps us interested for an hour and a half from a narrative point of view without resorting to additional elements. "Buried" has been a technical challenge of the highest order and through all the process there’s been one key. 1958 Golden Globe and 1972 Cecil B. DeMille Award winning director Alfred Hitchcock. Hitch showed us how to shoot a whole movie in a boat in the middle of the sea in "Lifeboat" (1944) or in one single shot in real time "Rope" (1948); once the cogs of the dramatic machine are oiled and in place, the next step is to conceive of the movie in your head, coming up with a list of shots which put together captivate the spectator, holding his attention without any let ups or distractions; the narrative should vary as the story unfolds, with different rhythms and an array of expressive options used to keep the material fresh and the spectator’s eyes glued to the screen. The golden rule when it came to making "Buried" was simple: never go outside to the surface". The screenplay itself was a great proof we could stay underground throughout the story without interest flagging for so much as an instant, and, indeed, the script conclusively demonstrates that just the reverse is true: we had to stay underground. A narrative divided between two parallel stories, for example, which allowed oxygen from the outside world to filter into the cinema too early, would have be an unforgiveable betrayal of the anguish our character feels ( which the spectator shares). Had we emerged into the light, maybe showing a solitary answer-phone in the hallway of a house bathed in morning sunlight, or focused in on the baffled expression of a telephone operator chewing on gum as she tries her best to deal with a very unusual call, we would have only succeeded in making a big film much smaller, a classy film much cheaper, we would have ended up with more square feet and inches, and much less bang for our buck, turning a great suspense story into a bad TV-movie. The audience had to be allowed to connect with the lonely desperation of a man who has no choice but to trust in the purely abstract, in the people out there who might be good or bad, who might be fat or thin, who might be who they say they are: but then again who might just not be; the voices which are ultimately nothing more than the electronic impulses sent to the receiver by a cold, anonymous satellite far away. The only reality our character knows for sure is the pure angst of his reduced, rectangular universe, the menacing darkness which surrounds him and this connection with an unknown outside world, a red-hot nail he has no choice but to desperately hang onto. The rest was fairly straightforward in comparison. All that was required was to forget about the coffin as quickly as possible, to treat the location just like any other, not let ourselves feel limited by the space. The thing was to keep moving constantly, never allowing the film come to a standstill, making each and every movement a feat, each change of position one more chimera, each decision an adventure. We delved into the box of visual tricks which allowed us to do this not according to the order, but instead in line with the needs dictated by the narrative, as the film engaged in a constant struggle to reinvent itself, never falling into repetition, always advancing in its visual fire-power following the most implacable narrative logic. Was the brusque, handheld tracking shot in the coffin really necessary? All that was required was to find the right way of doing it. Seven different coffins were designed for our different needs. The film tries to take something from Martin Scorsese at his most playful, and the logic of the films of Oscar winner Steven Spielberg ("Schindler's List" & "Saving Private Ryan") films from the seventies: no green screens, or high contrast nodes, nothing but the pure, sweaty pleasure of shooting; everything you see on screen happened, from the shots when the camera circles around the character in an incomprehensible way, to those when it descends from above on the back of a Technocrane; the key thing was to get the audience inside the confused and tortured head of the hapless Paul Conroy, to make the audience feel the dense dampness of his sweat, the suffocating heat, the lack of oxygen, the sand lacerating and eroding his skin, the rough, splintered wood, flattened-down nails, rusty and dangerous. Because "Buried" was shot very quickly, it demanded an enormous amount of concentration, enabling the film itself to feed on the precise, tense and rigorous energy felt on the set. There were six minute long takes with no cuts, creating the conditions for Ryan Reynolds to achieve an absolutely organic performance, allowing his emotions to grow and flow, bringing forth and spilling out like a torrent. The elements at our disposal were, objectively speaking, minimal, but far from considering that a disadvantage, we thought of the limitation as our greatest strength: only the essential remained. The tiniest dramatic detail of this microcosm was manipulated and carefully controlled, allowing the drama experienced by our character buried under the ground to be the main focus our attention. Ryan Reynolds is like a Stradivarius. The very best you can dream of. The narrative is full of emotional twists and turns. Ryan searches for the truth in each and every shot, and his sense of timing is simply out of this world. How does he do it? How did he look for the best light at the same time as he screamed down his mobile phone and still come across as firm but never at the cost of empathy? How did he subtly alter his voice as it builds, until finally letting it break down in a controlled way, always with a perfect sense of timing? Or else hit the torch with his fist during each tiny pause, without ever drowning out the dialogue, at the same time turning to avoid a shadow and help make a camera movement more seamless, turning the direction of the torch ever so slightly, shining the light against his chest to illuminate the right side of his face when the sand covers the light for just a second? Nobody knows how he did all these things, how he did them every day over the course of three weeks. Ryan went back to Los Angeles a physical wreck; no doubt he had to justify to US customs officials why sand trickled to the floor whenever he blinked. His sense of commitment went simply beyond the call of duty. Seventeen shooting days, no more. Twenty five shots each and every day. Sometimes thirty or even thirty five. How did we do it? I don’t even know myself. 2003 Young Hollywood and 2005 Teen Choice Award winner Ryan Reynolds has emerged as one of Hollywood’s most sought after leading men and was named one of People Magazine’s 'Sexiest Men' of 2008. He stars in the upcoming film "Paperman", a comedy that also stars Emma Stone, Jeff Daniels and Lisa Kudrow, and was recently seen in the hit feature film "The Proposal" opposite Sandra Bullock and "Adventureland" opposite Kristen Stewart, a comedy that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January to great reviews and was released in March 2009. Opposite an all-star cast including Hugh Jackman, Live Schreiber, Dominic Monaghan and Taylor Kitsch, Reynolds starred in “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” in May 2009. His role as Deadpool, the wisecracking, cancer-stricken mercenary, led to the recently revealed Deadpool spin-off for 20th Century Fox. His other credits include director Joe Carnahan’s cracker 2006 film "Smokin’ Aces", featuring Ray Liotta, Jeremy Piven, Andy Garcia, Ben Affleck and Jason Bateman, as well as "The Amityville Horror", a remake of the classic cult film. Reynolds was memorable in the title role of Van in the cult classic "Van Wilder", as well as the romantic comedy "Just Friends" and in the outrageously funny "Waiting" (2005), set in a ficticious restaurant named Shenaniganz, starring Anna Faris, Justin Long and Luis Guzmán. For his co-starring role with Jessica Biel and Wesley Snipes in "Blade Trinity", Reynolds underwent an impressive physical transformation for his role as the acerbic vampire, Hannibal King. Reynolds soon be seen starring in the upcoming "Green Lantern" as the famed superhero. Rodrigo Cortés discovered a fondness for filmmaking at an early stage. At sixteen he had already directed his first short film in Super8. In 1998 he directed the short "Yul", that won over twenty awards and in 2001 he released "Fifteen Days", a fake documentary in the form of a large short film that earned over fifty seven awards at festivals, becoming the most awarded Spanish short film of the time. In 2007 he made his feature film deut directing "The Contestant" (Concursante), The film that was released to critical applause and earned several awards, including the Critic’s prize at Malaga Film Festival. Chris Sparling is a writer, director and actor from Providence, Rhode Island. In addition to writing "Buried", he also wrote the thriller "mercy", a project slated for production in 2010. His start in film came several years ago, when he wrote, directed, produced and starred in the indie feature "An uzi at the Alamo". Born in Barcelona in 1981 Eduard Grau says "Buried" is his first and last film in a coffin. He has been twice the winner of cinematography awards at Palm Springs, with "Friends Forever" and "The Natural Route". "Friends Forever" won Best Short prize in Sundance 2006, was Nominated for the Student Oscars 2007 and received the Royal Television Society (UK) Student Television Award in 2008. At twenty three he shot his first feature, "Honor de Cavalleria" which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006. Later, he photographed "Kicks", that recently premiered at the Edinburgh and London Film Festivals 2009. Most recently, Edu was the cinematographer in Tom Ford’s acclaimed debut feature, "A Single Man", which premiered in Venice’09 and was nominated in the Best Actor In A Lead Role category at the 2010 Academy Awards (Colin Firth). "Buried" was produced by Peter Safran is the founder of The Safran Company and Safran Digital Group (SDG), a digital media entertainment and Adrián Guerra, one of the founder partners of Versus Entertainment. Executive Producer Alejandro Miranda is a founder partner of Versus Entertainment. What's It All About?

Open your eyes. You're in a closed space beneath the Iraqi soil. You have ninety minutes of oxygen left to breathe. Your only connection to the outside world is a mysterious cell phone with limited reception and battery life. And each second is a second closer to surviving or dying. Paul Conroy, truck driver and family man, working for CRT in Iraq. He's not there for the politics. Paul is just doing a job. One he hopes, will in the end, put him ahead finacially. Until terrorist attack the convoy of trucks he was a part of. Some are killed, but he survives to wake up buried alive in an old wooden coffin, with only a lighter, a torch and a cell phone. Not knowing who may have put him there or why, his only chance to escape this nightmare is the cell phone. Poor reception, a low battery and lack of oxygen are his worst enemies in a frantic race against time. Paul has only ninety minutes to be rescued.

The Verdict "The thought of being buried alive is one none of us wants to comptemplate. The thought of being captured by terrorists and buried alive in order to extract a large ransom payment from helpless family members is beyond comprehension. What would it be like to wake-up and find ones-self, confined in a coffin, trapped with no means of escape, totally helpless and at the mercy of faceless people. It defies imagination. So how then would you feel about watching a film that runs for ninety minutes or so and is set wholly within a wooden coffin, buried beneath the sands of Iraq, foccussing on the plight of just one person? If you are, like many people, one of those who suffers from claustrophobia, you've probably already broken out in a 'fear' sweat. Your heart is already beating so hard it sounds like a team of Japanese Drum players belting out a tune in your earholes. Your likely to be feeling a little weak as your imagination conjures up terrible images of trying to claw through the coffin lid with your bare hands. Don't waste your precious breath. Sorry, did I mention the amount of air you have left is limited? That's the plight of Paul Conroy, family man, truck driver working in Iraq and now trapped, who knows where, in a coffin, somewhere beneath the sands of Iraq. "Buried" stars an actor you'd hardly consider for such an emotive, dramatic role: Ryan Reynolds. He's good. "Buried" is good. Make no mistake, you'll be on the edge of your seat. 4 STARS." The Production Team

Director Screenplay Producers Original Music Cinematography Film Editing

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Rodrigo Cortés Chris Sparling Adrián Guerra & Peter Safran Víctor Reyes Eduard Grau Rodrigo Cortés

Who Is Playing Who?

Ryan Reynolds José Luis García Pérez Robert Paterson Stephen Tobolowsky Samantha Mathis Ivana Miño Warner Loughlin Erik Palladino Kali Rocha Chris William Martin Cade Dundish Mary Songbird Kirk Baily Anne Lockhart Robert Clotworthy Michalla Petersen Juan Hidalgo Abdelilah Ben Massou

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Paul Conroy Jabir Dan Brenner Alan Davenport Linda Conroy Pamela Lutti Maryanne Conroy/Donna Mitchell/Rebecca Browning Special Agent Harris 911 Operator voice State Department Rep Shane Conroy 411 Female Operator voice 411 Male Operator voice CRT Operator voice CRT Spokesman Nursing Home Nurse Kidnapper Kidnapper

Run Time 95 minutes Rated MA15+ [AUST] Copyright ©2010 - Lionsgate Films - All Rights Reserved ©1999-2010 The Movie Pages & impact Internet Services. All Rights Reserved. Protected by Australian and International Copyright. Trademark Laws and Intellectual Property Rights apply.