Christian Slater has signed onto "Rites of Passage," and indie thriller with Stephen Dorff, Wes Bentley and Kate Maberly. The film marks the directorial debut of screenwriter Peter Iliff ("Point Break," "Patriot Games").
Mark Canton produces with Jonathan Sachar, David Hopwood and W.D. Johnson. Financing for the project will come from Johnson's new company, Demarest Films.
According to
Variety, the screenplay by Illiff tells of an anthropology bookworm who laments his place in a society that lacks a ceremony to mark his transition into manhood and leads his hard-partying, stressed-out classmates to his family's abandoned ranch -- where his brother lives in a psychotic world of drugs, guilt and Chumash Indian rituals.
Slater is in as the brother and Bentley will play his meth-head sidekick.