Starz Digital has provided ComingSoon.net with the exclusive poster for Jay Martin’s 7 Minutes, a crime thriller starring Jason Ritter, Zane Holtz and Luke Mitchell as a trio of friends who commit a brazen robbery in order to pay back a debt to a notorious gangster. Even though the job should only take 7 minutes, things get complicated.
It’s the directorial debut by Martin, who had a background as a storyboard artist for Francis Lawrence films like Constantine, I Am Legend and even the most recent “Hunger Games,” as well as directing dozens of music videos. Since he hadn’t found any scripts he really liked, he decided to write his own.
The movie’s loosely based on a family legend that was passed along before finally getting to Martin. “My ancestors are from this town, Red Level, Alabama, and there was a story sometime in the 1940s about one of my distant relatives who robbed his own uncle’s bank and he got caught and had to go jail. I always thought that would be a good basis for a crime movie—robbing your own family and trying to get away with it. But the fact that ‘7 Minutes’ is about three guys who rob their uncle’s store is the only similarity.”
“We did it in a very traditional way,” Martin said about casting the three main actors including Jason Ritter, who plays a very different role. “I went and met a lot of people and had coffee and talked about the roles. Those three guys really jumped out to me. We brought a lot of people in for auditions, but those three, they were the guys. Jason (Ritter), I was really excited about him because I’d never seen him doing something like this, but there was this image of him from some other project and I know that he can go there and be this darker character. We talked about it and he was really excited about going in that direction.”
Martin also told us about how musician/actor Kris Kristofferson came on board to play Mr B, the crime boss whose demands lead the trio to turn to bank robbery. “He read the script and he really responded to the character and he said, ‘All right, this guy is a straight shooter, I’ll do it.’ That was it. He just liked that character and the way he was laid-out. He’s sort of like the Godfather of this royal crime family and he was just like ‘I’m in!’ He did it and he was amazing. He brought a whole nother level to the film I made.
7 Minutes was produced by Mean Creek director Jacob Estes, one of Martin’s best friends, who brought it to that film’s producer Rick Rosenthal, who was also a noted filmmaker in his own right, having directed Sean Penn’s early movie Bad Boys. “They both had their own specialties,” he said about their contributions as filmmakers to his directorial debut. “Jacob is a writer and he was amazing developing the script. I brought him the script and we probably spent three or four months developing the script and working on it getting it in shape to take it out to the talent. Jacob was amazing in that capacity, and then on set, Rick has directed a dozen movies at least and then he’s directed I don’t know how many hours of television, but he’s really good in a physical, on-set (way). He’s been there, he’s done that, so it was really helpful to have him on set.”
Lastly, Martin told us about coming up with the cool image for the movie’s poster, which you can see below. “Basically, we had a poster very similar—it was kind of a little more retro—and then Starz took that and created what you see as the poster. I think it’s really strong and that logo, the gun into the 7 that was our trademark logo from the beginning.”
7 Minutes will be available to watch in theaters, on iTunes and On Demand starting Friday, June 26.
