Sir Roger Moore to star in new film `The Sangraal` with Robert Downey Jr

James Bond legend Sir Roger Moore will be starring in a $50 million movie to be filmed in Abu Dhabi, studio chiefs have announced.

Hollywood wild boy Robert Downey Jr is also set to appear in The Sangraal, an archaeological thriller - reports Gulf News.

It is the first film from Nickelson Entertainment Group (NEG), which has plans to create a film studio in the UAE.

Producers are hoping to recruit an actress from this region to play a major role and will also be scouting locally for extras.

Michelle Nickelson, chief executive of NEG, told Gulf News that about half the film would be made in Abu Dhabi with most of the rest shot in Budapest.

She said it was easy to recruit big names such as Moore and Downey Jr to star in the movie, filming for which is likely to start in December or January and last for six weeks.

"My partner on the film, Bill Macdonald, is a pretty well-known producer in Hollywood. If you're in the business at that level, it's not difficult at all to get people like this.

"It's very exciting because it's something we've been waiting to do for a long time," she said.

The action adventure film, due for release in summer 2006, also starts John Rhys Davis, who played Gimli in Lord of the Rings, and Joachim de Almeida, well known from the television series 24.

In The Sangraal, Downey Jr plays the film's lead character Stone, an Abu Dhabi-based archaeologist who "unwittingly ends up solving one of the world's greatest mysteries".

Moore stars as Murdoch Macarthur, the head of an ancient organisation, while Rhys Davis is a senior churchman who uses de Almeida as "the instrument of his evil wrath".

Nickelson said if there were no sequels to The Sangraal, the film's characters would become a television series called The Seventh Protocol.

Described as a cross between the The X Files, Indiana Jones and Nicholas Cage's National Treasure, the action-adventure film has a budget of more than $50 million.

NEG will also soon be announcing plans to make a film in Dubai, partly because, as Nickelson put it, filming costs in the UAE were "much lower" than those in the United States.

William Baker III, a consultant with NEG, said The Sangraal, along with the company's other projects, would show the people what the Gulf region has to offer.

"The rest of the world has long overlooked the potential of the Arab world. George Clooney was in Dubai last year and people are starting to look into this region. Making this film here is a very good statement for this area," he said.

As reported in Gulf News, NEG was created last year with the aim of making feature films and television series in the UAE as well as developing a local film studio.

Nickelson and her father Carl, who is also involved with NEG, worked in California at Manex Entertainment, which won two Oscars for visual effects in films What Dreams May Come and The Matrix.

The money for The Sangraal is coming from BlackHawk Film and Entertainment Fund, which was created in 2005 in partnership with Dune Hawk Capital in Dubai to let investors from the UAE or abroad put their money into films.

Thanks to `JP` for the alert.

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