RUPERT WYATT is the writer and director of the highly acclaimed British prison escape thriller The Escapist. The film premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, was nominated for eight international film awards, and was the winner of two.
Born in England, Wyatt was sent off to boarding school at the age of four. Along with the other students, he was required to speak entirely in Latin during the weekdays and only allowed to converse in English on the weekends. Deemed "remarkably intelligent but stubborn as a mule" by his headmaster, Wyatt spent his free time making slasher films using a Super-8 camera. Werner Herzog saw one of these early works, Bloody Mayhem in 3rd Form House, and launched Wyatt's career by recommending him for the prestigious New Moon writing and directing fellowship.
Winner of a BBC film competition at the age of 16, Wyatt's professional career as a director and screenwriter began while at university in Paris. His graduate thesis, a contemporary adaption of Dante's Divine Comedy (Jericho Falling), became his first screenplay to be optioned and was developed by a number of producers and directors including Claudie Ossard (Delicatessen, Amelie), George Litto (Blow Out), Ian Softley (Wings of a Dove), and Shooting Gallery (You Can Count on Me). This was followed by five years of writing and developing features in New York for Shooting Gallery, Miramax and Radical Media. Between the years 2000-2005, Wyatt worked in London and Liverpool, directing episodic television and developing his own scripts through the UK Film Council lottery, and he founded the Film Consortium with producers Adrian Sturges, Simon Relph and Michael Kuhn.
Wyatt is the founder of the film collective Picture Farm, which has produced numerous shorts, documentaries and features, including the Sundance Award-winning documentary Dark Days (directed by Marc Singer) which follows a group of people living in an abandoned section of the New York City subway system.
©2011 20th Century Fox
