The Debt

Helen Mirren is shooting in Budapest

John Madden, who is also responsible for movies such as Shakespeare in Love and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, is currently shooting his latest picture, The Debt in London, Tel Aviv and right here in our capital, Budapest. The plot of his thriller starts off in the 1960s when in the course of their secret mission three young Mossad agents assassinate a Nazi sergeant who had been in charge of carrying out experiments on humans in Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp during WWII. Now let’s fast forward thirty years. The country is Ukraine. A mysterious stranger appears at a health clinic claiming that he is in fact the sergeant who had been long assumed dead. Rachel, one of the former Mossad agents, (played by Helen Mirren) who is retired by now, goes on a mission to get to the bottom of things and travels to Ukraine. Matthew Vaughn, Jane Goldman and Peter Straughan wrote the script for The Debt that is in fact the English remake of Assaf Bernstein’s 2007 Israeli movie Ha-hov. Back then, his work was nominated in as many as four categories by the Israeli Film Academy.

Screen from Ha-hov

After wrapping up the London scenes, they have brought the movie set right here to Budapest. Ildiko Kemeny, the producer of the Hungarian production company, who she herself spends half her time on the further side of the English Channel, did not reveal much about the movie to Filmhu except that the British production company of The Debt chose Pioneer Pictures as its continental counterpart solely due to its reference works. She also disclosed that they had been shooting for over a week now in Budapest and even though they will be relocating temporarily to Tel-Aviv for a while, they are going to return once more to the Hungarian set. A few weeks ago they built one of the movie sets, namely Charlie Checkpoint and a replica of a segment of the Berlin Wall right in District VIII, at Matyas Square. Beside the Berlin-alike footage, Budapest is going to play body double for some other cities like Tel Aviv. Also, they are planning to shoot several inside and outside scenes here that are supposed to take place in Ukraine in the movie.