Stapleton, Russell to star in crime thriller Tony Ayres, who is working on the new film, Cut Snake. TONY Ayres, the director of Walking on Water and The Home Song Stories and recent TV works The Slap and Underground: The Julian Assange Story, will return to the big screen for the feature film Cut Snake. Animal Kingdom's Sullivan Stapleton will lead an ensemble including Chronicle's Alex Russell and Arrow's Jessica De Gouw in the crime thriller written by Trevor Blainey (The Time of Our Lives and The Straits). Blainey and one of Ayres's partners at Matchbox Pictures, Michael McMahon, will produce the period drama. It will premiere at next year's Melbourne International Film Festival. IT'S Sullivan Stapleton day: the actor has also been named as one of two honourees of the Australians in Film Benefit Dinner to be held in Los Angeles in late October. Jacki Weaver, the dual Academy Award nominee and Stapleton's co-star in Animal Kingdom, will be honoured as well. Stapleton will be awarded the Breakthrough prize by the Los Angeles-based non-profit that serves as a guild for Australians in the US film industry. Weaver can currently be seen in Stoker opposite Nicole Kidman and Mia Wasikowska and will next be seen in Parkland, which premieres at the Venice and Toronto film festivals. Stapleton has just completed filming the 300 sequel, 300: Rise of an Empire. AiF will also present Australian film collective Blue-Tongue Films, whose members include Kieran Darcy-Smith, Luke Doolan and the Edgerton brothers Joel and Nash, with the second annual AiF International Collaboration Award. THE Adelaide Film Festival launches its full program tomorrow ahead of its October season. One little tidbit that Reel Time can reveal is ABC TV's successful dalliance with film festivals continues beyond the announcement of At The Movies' Margaret Pomeranz and David Stratton as AFF patrons. The Adelaide fest will also premiere The Broken Shore, the new telemovie based on crime doyen Peter Temple's best selling novel and directed by The Boys and Little Fish's Rowan Woods. The telemovie starring some of Reel Time's faves Don Hany, Claudia Karvan, Dan Wyllie, Erik Thomson and Robyn Nevin will have its world premiere in Adelaide ahead of its screening on ABC1. As previously announced, John Curran's Tracks, starring Mia Wasikowska, will open the Festival, on October 10. ANOTHER day, another young Australian cast in a major Hollywood film. Yesterday Stef Dawson joined the cast of The Hunger Games franchise -- and a lifetime of fanboy conferences should she so choose. It's a quick ascension for Dawson, a Canberra native who has starred in a number of local shorts and indie features but nothing that has been released in theatres. She will star as the character Annie Cresta, Finnick's (played by Sam Claflin) love interest in the films. WHILE I have the attention of the tweens, I should alert them to the special exclusive national screenings of One Direction's new film, One Direction: This Is Us. The film opens internationally this week, but won't open here until September 19 in the school holidays. Hardcore fans can see it exclusively at Event Cinemas across the country this Saturday at 3pm. Having seen firsthand the fervour the British boy band can generate, I'd advise readers to steer clear of multiplexes on Saturday afternoon. Tickets are available now at www.eventcinemas.com.au. REEL Time spoke to Cate Blanchett last week for a feature for this weekend's Review section. Two things didn't make the cut. Firstly, Blanchett is as clueless as the rest of us as to when we might see her performance in Terrence Malick's film Knight of Cups. But she made an interesting observation about Malick, the reclusive and enigmatic director of The Tree of Life, Badlands and Days of Heaven. "He's making one big film, one big story and then he carves them off into films," Blanchett says. Also, as a somewhat frustrated audience member during the Sydney Theatre Company's season of The Maids -- directed by Benedict Andrews and starring Blanchett opposite Isabelle Huppert and Elizabeth Debicki -- Reel Time had to ask about that distracting video screen above the stage. Blanchett conceded it was "difficult to navigate" because the actors couldn't guide the audience's focus as easily as they normally would. But, Blanchett said, "a lot of people who spend a lot of time analysing or making cinema or working with the screen found it more distracting than regular cinemagoers because you're analysing that image. For me it worked best when the screen wasn't telling a story, it was dealing with the life of inanimate objects, so it worked as a counterpoint. AND congratulations to the "early career" producers chosen to participate in the inaugural Screen Producers Association of Australia Ones to Watch program. In no particular order, they are: Pennie Brown, Kylie Bryant, Brian Cobb, Julian Vincent Costanzo, Jo Dyer, Ester Harding, Mike Kang, Tenille Kennedy, Dan Lake, Juliet Lamont, Greg Logan, Emma Morris, Kate Pappas, Lara Radulovich, Behren Schulz, Lisa Shaunessy, Kristen Souvlis and Christine Williams. The winners have been matched to established film and television producers who will coach and mentor the participants leading up to the Screen Forever: SPAA Conference 2013. They can also apply for Studio Kickstart, an exclusive opportunity to produce a TV series with a $300,000 budget for Studio, Foxtel's arts and entertainment channel.