Liam Hellmann Makes Directing Debut With 'Trafalgar'

Liam Hellmann has directed his first feature film, a family crime story called Trafalgar now in post-production, according to Variety.

Post-production means the filming is finished and the team is now editing picture and sound. The cast is led by Fanny Ardant, Élodie Bouchez, Danny Huston and Stacy Martin.

The story centres on a young man raised in a house run by women. He has one week to find €80,000 to pay off his estranged father’s debts. His answer is to get the family to plan a robbery.

Ardant plays the grandmother. Bouchez plays the mother. Martin plays the sister. Huston plays the estranged father whose debts set the plot in motion.

The wider ensemble includes Lou Lampros as the girlfriend and Khaled Alouach as the best friend, according to Variety.

What makes this stand out is how fast and loose the shoot was. Hellmann filmed Trafalgar in 12 days on a €1.3 million budget.

There was no conventional screenplay on set. The actors worked from a seven-page outline and built dialogue and scenes together during the shoot.

Hellmann had not planned it that way from the start. He wrote around 60 versions of a full script before dropping that approach in favour of the outline.

The film reunites him with producer Charles Benoin, his partner on Only What We Carry. Benoin is producing Trafalgar through his company Atlas Pictures.

Only What We Carry, their earlier collaboration, lists Benoin, Hellmann and Jouri Smit among its production credits, according to AlloCiné.

No release date has been announced. For now, the next step is finishing the edit and locking the final cut.