Pro-gun US star says Trump will win presidential election

The pro-gun US star of a high school massacre movie at the Venice film festival said Thursday that Donald Trump will win the US presidential election in November.

"Everybody says they are not going to vote for him, that he's an asshole because the newspapers are full of stuff about what a crazy maniac he is," said Thomas Jane, who heads the cast of the action thriller "Run Hide Fight".

"But they are all going to vote for him. Watch," the "Boogie Nights" actor told reporters before the controversial film's red carpet premiere. "He will win."

Jane and producer Dallas Sonnier -- a gun rights supporting Texan who heads the Cinestate studio responsible for a string of "populist" movies often loved by Trump supporters -- said they wanted to open up the debate on school shootings in the US.

Trump has staunchly supported the pro-gun lobby despite the mounting death toll of killings.

"Run Hide Fight" starts with a bonding trip that sees the heroine -- who later takes on the shooters at her school -- hunt a stag with her father.

She bludgeons it to death with a rock when her shot fails to kill it.

Jane, who himself has a 17-year-old daughter with actress Patricia Arquette, said the story spoke to him.

"The subject is taboo," he claimed, even though "hundreds of school shootings are going on across the US, many of them unreported."

"Everyone wants to tow the line. Nobody wanted to do a movie about it. Everybody is so goddamned touchy in this country, and I'm sick of it," he added.

"I am sick of not being able to have an open discussion and a disagreement."

Sonnier, who lost both his parents to gun violence in two separate incidents, said the film's theme of a young girl and her father fighting back drew him to the project because his own parents "never had a chance".

The producer was also behind the Mel Gibson tough cop drama, "Dragged Across Concrete" and "Militia".

Although Sonnier has said that he didn't vote for Trump, he conceded many of his film appeal to some of the president's core supporters.

Director Rankin said his film -- whose title is taken from the Hide Run Fight protocol for students when shooting starts in a school -- was "about kids being allowed to fight back".

He said it was "neither pro- nor anti-gun, so that it might encourage more dialogue than division."