By At last report back in April, multiple Oscar-nominated screenwriter John Logan (“Gladiator,” “Skyfall”) had come onboard to help co-write the long-gestating film adaptation of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy’s most infamous work “Blood Meridian” at New Regency.
John Hillcoat (“The Proposition,” “Lawless”), who previously helmed a McCarthy adaptation with “The Road,” has long been slated to direct and produce along with Keith Redmon. Hillcoat had been working on the script last year with McCarthy before he died, with Logan essentially subbing for McCarthy.
Now, in a new interview with Big Reader Bad Grades (via World of Reel), Hillcoat says that he and McCarthy shared “three- and five-hour lunches” over the course of a few years in which they brainstormed adapting the work for the screen.
After McCarthy’s passing, Hillcoat has years of notes along with hours and hours of conversations to help shape the script. One such key change would be the Judge whose long monologues would see the “viewer would be taken out of the film”. As a result the character will have to say less.
The script is still being written, but Hillcoat says it is very much in pre-production with casting to likely begin soon – which is further along than any of the others who have attempted to adapt the work have gotten.
Widely considered one of the greatest works of American literature, the brutal 1985 book is set along the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s.
It follows the Kid, a 14-year-old Tennesseean and their experience with a group of scalp hunters who massacred Native Americans and others in the borderlands for bounty, pleasure, and eventually out of compulsion.
Hillcoat and Keith Redmon will produce, whilst McCarthy’s son John Francis McCarthy will serve as executive producer. The author will receive a posthumous executive producer credit.
The post “Blood Meridian” Film Still Progressing appeared first on Dark Horizons.
