Series production in Croatia
The shooting of the British series “Conversation with Friends” ended on Hvar a few days ago. It is a project produced by Element Pictures for BBC Three and Hulu based on the bestseller of the same name by Sally Rooney from 2017, whose debut novel became a world hit, This filming also confirms the growing popularity of film and series filming locations in Croatia.
According to available information, the team stayed on Hvar for more than a month, although IMDb, the largest film database, is still listed exclusively as Dublin in Ireland. The service production of the series was Embassy Studio, whose founder is Erika Milutin Diller from Embassy Films, who was also behind the filming of HBO’s world megahit when it was filmed in Croatia – the series “Game of Thrones”.
As for “Conversation with Friends”, this is the first season of the series which will have 12 episodes, and the four main characters from the book – student Frances who is the narrator and her best friend and married couple Melissa and Nick are played by Alison Oliver, Sasha Lane Jemima Kirke and Joe Alwyn. These are young actors, but those who are better acquainted with the world of show business will know who they are.
For example, 30-year-old Alwyn, in addition to an increasingly respectable acting career (he starred in the acclaimed director Ang Lee’s “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk”), is also a musician, not acting under the pseudonym William Bowery. At least that was the case for Taylor Swift’s album “Folklore”, for which Alwyn co-produced as many as six songs, and which won the award for best album of the year at this year’s Grammy Awards.
The strongest name of this series, however, is Lenny Abrahamson, who together with his colleague Leanne Welham was hired as the director of “Conversation with Friends”. Namely, in addition to the acclaimed black comedy “Frank”, Abrahamson is also the director of the hit film “Room” from 2015, or as the title reads in the original English “Room”, starring the fantastic Brie Larson, an Oscar-nominated film.
The series should hit small screens next year. Until the very end of filming, the cast, probably bound by a contract, did not publish pictures from Hvar, but after the last klapa fell, some of them posted photos like Joe Alwyn.
By the end of the summer, the shooting of the Swedish series “Spotify untold” (Croatian partners as a service production was MP – film production) and the director of Brandon Cronenberg’s film “Infinity pool” with Alexander Skarsgård, which was filmed in Šibenik, was completed. Croatian minority co-production (company 4film). According to what HAVC reveals to us, the shooting of the German film “Faraway” and the Russian series “Anna K.” is currently underway in Croatia.
The German series “Ze Network”, whose Croatian partners are the Blue Sky Adriatic service production, will soon start shooting. The team is already in Istria, more precisely in Pula, and 69-year-old David Hasselhoff, the star of the “Baywatch” series, plays himself in it.