Six Days to Die
“Parched, ragged, and dragging a heavy iron chain, a lone Gambler hobbles eastward through the endless desert. Not even a day behind him, a blood-thirsty Marshal in a priest’s collar exterminates everything in her path, hellbent on catching her prey. When the Gambler inadvertently rescues a young boy from a town gone mad, the boy sticks to him like glue as they escape together before the Marshal arrives to burn the town to the ground. But when the Marshal finally confronts the Gambler, he must make a terrible choice if he hopes to escape with his life.”
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Best known as the indie darling who helped reinvigorate the Western genre in Canadian cinema when his micro-budget Spaghetti Western starring Colm Feore, Six Reasons Why, took the Toronto International Film Festival by storm. Matt immediately booked a series of Entertainment Tonight exclusives and an international bidding war on his film ignited. When the dust settled, Six Reasons Why was on the market in over a dozen countries with distributors like ThinkFilm, eOne Entertainment and Image releasing it around the globe.
His forays into the Science Fiction genre have been met with enthusiasm from industry and audience alike; after the short he helmed, D.N.E.: Do Not Erase won the Best Science Fiction Award at the genre convention Dragon*Con, the SyFy Network greenlit Matt’s Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi script, Mutant World.
Returning to his Sci-Fi Spaghetti Western roots, Matt spent the COVID-19 pandemic completing a SixVerse Trilogy when he directed both “Six Days to Die” and “Six Guns for Hire” with some of the most sought-after on-screen talent in Canada.
As a work-in-progress, this cut of SIX DAYS TO DIE has a few remaining VFX shots outstanding, some sound effects are incomplete, and the music has several live instruments yet to be included.
I absolutely LOVE genre film, and the exploration of imaginary worlds in motion pictures. From my childhood love of SciFi to falling in love with Werewolf films in my tweens and then with spaghetti Westerns as a teenager, the place where monsters and the future collide is my jam. I love genre festivals, and my films have played and won at Dragon*Con and WorldFest Houston. It’s the broad-minded reverence that make a genre film festival the perfect fit to premiere SIX DAYS TO DIE, because this is a film steeped in Leone’s revisionist spaghetti westerns and then smashed into Mad Max’s interceptor. It’s a frontier future where we see our own world scrambled into a whole new context for western tropes, cooking up race and religion and sex and gender in a fresh wild west recipe. To me, that’s what genre is for: to alter the lens of reality, to bend our world just enough to check our own prejudice at the theatre door and accept a story into our hearts in a pure way. And maybe we learn something new about ourselves along the journey.
Six Days to Die exists in a vicious world where the characters are twisted and off-balance, the visual tones are harsh, the environment is barren and austere, and the exact period in time is ambiguously post-apocalyptic. Filmed one actor at a time during the COVID-19 pandemic, Six Days to Die uses green screen and digital matte paintings to bring dozens of actors together inside of a wide open cinematic universe.