EXCLUSIVE: JLA Snags A-List Producer; Shooting in Aus!?

Even though the Justice League movie is moving ahead at a furious pace, Warner Bros seem adamant to not even acknowledge its existence - this despite the fact that everybody and their dog knows George Miller is prepping the project and casting has commenced in the US and Canada. From our initial casting scoop I speculated that the movie might lens in Canada due to the presence of more offices up there than in the US, however it looks like that won€™t be the case. Thanks to info sent to us, primarily from an OWF reader in the Australian film community, we€™ve now got several more bits of Justice League information to share with you:-

The studio has greenlit the project as their summer 2009 tentpole. Filming for the principals will take place in Sydney from February to June 2008 €“ George Miller was unsurprisingly listed as director in the info we got. Auditions are starting up down under with Nikki Barrett (Baz Luhrmann€™s Australia, The Proposition) hired to handle the casting in Australia. Ronna Kress (Beowulf, The Mummy 3) will oversee the entire casting process. Oscar-winner Barrie M. Osborne (The Lord of the Rings, The Matrix) will take on producing duties; he€™ll be joined by Miller€™s partner Doug Mitchell.

Things seem to be pulling sharply into focus as the weeks progress, and with Osborne they have a top A-list producer who€™s ideal to make a film of this size€ but it€™d still be nice to hear some official word from the studio. I find Warners€™ secrecy frustrating because, after all, they are just a movie studio making a comic film and not the CIA planning to take down a terrorist cell. However there€™s a myriad of DC Comics films that have crumbled in various stages of production so the they have reason to be overly cautious with this one.