Funding Approval Details

An airport camera snaps young Australian wunderkind DANIEL CARTER, 27, as he clears US customs. At last, this is real. The CIA are going to develop his invention: a brilliant new optics system that can clearly identify human faces from 3 kilometres away.

Like a modern day ANZAC, Daniel’s been recruited into another nation’s war: America’s secretive drone conflict being fought from Creech Air Force base, Nevada, outside Las Vegas.

In this high pressure environment Daniel has one job: get his camera working. He's an engineer in a war room between two worlds; obliterating the domestic peace of distant lands from a console by day, returning to the comfortable if surreal city of Las Vegas by night.

Daniel isn’t the only visitor the war has brought to Las Vegas. An enigmatic, cultured NS contemplative man in his 40’s we will know only as the ASSASSIN, has arrived ready to kill drone pilots. Then there’s ETHAN BRIK, a mercenary spy chasing Daniel’s invention, and ANIA, a professional poker player Daniel meets at the tables, who is clearly avoiding something or someone.

In the tradition of slowburn thrillers like No Country for Old Men, Sicario and In a Better World, Midnight Empire is a contained story which uses character conflict to mirror a global one. In the climax, as Daniel wrestles with his choice of allegiance, he and the Assassin finally meet face to face. Daniel stands to lose more than his innocence in this foreign war.