The Flying Dutchman

A son goes to sea to find the one ship every sailor prays never to meet. Holland, 1650. On the night his mother dies, Philip Vanderdecken learns what became of his father. Off the Cape of Good Hope, in a storm, the captain swore he would round it if he had to sail until Judgment Day, and killed one of his own crew. He has been sailing ever since. Sailors call the ship the Flying Dutchman, and they know that to see her is to be lost. One thing can end it: the relic his mother wore at her throat, placed in the captain's hand by someone of his blood. Philip takes it to sea. He marries Amine, who has her Arab mother's gift for seeing what is hidden, and leaves her for voyage after voyage. Whenever the Dutchman appears, his own ship goes down, and he is the one the sea gives back. A sailor he saw drown is waiting on the next deck. In Goa, the Inquisition builds a fire for his wife. When Philip finally stands before his father, he is the older man, and the curse asks him for the last thing he has left to give.

A NOTE FROM US

You have known this ship all your life. It drifts through the background of other people's films; it is a ride at an amusement park and a joke in a cartoon. What almost no one has been told is the story itself: the oath, the son, the relic, the woman in Goa. It has been in print since 1839 and in sailors' mouths for longer. It belongs to no studio, and in two hundred years nobody has given it a film of its own size. We think we know why. Nearly all of it happens on open water, in foul weather, aboard ships that no longer exist, and nothing sinks a film budget faster than water. It happens to be the thing our tools do best. A storm off the Cape costs us a sliver of what it would cost a studio, and the money goes to the people who decide what the film is: a writer, a director, an editor, and the time to get it right. For now this is an idea and a poster. Whether it becomes a film is not up to a committee, because we don't have one. It is up to the people who want to see it. If you are one of them, back the project, and we will sit down to write. Raise the red sails.