“This is by far the sweetest and most good-natured film I’ve made,” Mason says. Think “Romeo and Juliet” with hazmat suits.

courier named Nico (Apa), who is immune to the disease, attempts to find a way out of the nightmare with his girlfriend, Sara (Sofia Carson), who has been trapped for years in lockdown.

In this bleak and blighted landscape, an L.A. The first major feature film to be made during the pandemic in Los Angeles, “Songbird” is set in 2023, with the world under siege from a coronavirus that has gone through several increasingly deadly mutations and the infected forced into oppressive quarantine camps known as Q-Zones. Then again, there’s been a whole lot about the nine months that no one ever could have imagined. He said, ‘What’s happening is terrible, but we should just get together and make a movie like we did in the old days.’ ”Īt that point, Mason never could have imagined that, just nine months later, the film born of that phone call, the dystopian pandemic sci-fi thriller “Songbird,” would be heading toward its PVOD release this Friday, with Michael Bay on board as a producer and a cast including Bradley Whitford, Demi Moore, Craig Robinson and “Riverdale” star KJ Apa. “He and I came out of this very guerrilla filmmaking world back in England. “My writing partner Simon Boyes called me up, sounding unexpectedly excited,” Mason says. Having directed a string of low-budget horror films and thrillers with titles like “The Devil’s Chair,” “Blood River” and “They Come Knocking,” the 45-year-old Mason was now coming face-to-face with true fear. He was worried about his wife and three young children, with whom he shares a two-bedroom duplex in L.A., and about his aging parents living 5,000 miles away in his native England. With the worsening coronavirus crisis triggering lockdowns and blaring headlines around the country, a passion project Mason was set to direct for Blumhouse Pictures had shut down just five days into pre-production.

On March 14, filmmaker Adam Mason, like virtually everyone else in Hollywood and across the planet Earth, was freaking out.

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