Last week, I stuffed you catamites to the thrapple with the news that Pulitzer-Prize-winning novelist and infamously lapstrake curmudgeon Cormac McCarthy had written a script. Today, Toldja.com reports that Ridley Scott is in talks to direct, which is either a huge deal or nothing at all, considering Scott has been attached to roughly eleventy quintillion projects in the last few years.
Scott has several films he’s considering, but there is a strong possibility this could be his next film and his followup to Prometheus, the 3D space film which Fox releases this summer.
Scott had been mulling several options, including an historical epic about Gertrude Bell that The Constant Gardener scribe Jeffrey Caine is currently rewriting, and Child 44 at Summit Entertainment. But Scott has been talking directly to McCarthy and it’s looking likely that he and his Scott Free Entertainment banner will come aboard the film and join Wechsler and the Schwartz’s as producers.
The Counselor is reminiscent of the rough and tumble world depicted in No Country For Old Men. The protagonist is a respected lawyer who thinks he can dip a toe in to the drug business without getting sucked down. It is a bad decision and he tries his best to survive it and get out of a desperate situation. [Deadline]
Speaking of dipping a toe in and getting sucked down, this seems like a volatile combination. A first screenplay from a novelist famously cantankerous towards the idea of collaboration (the Wall Street Journal famously asked him, “is there something compelling about the collaborative process compared to the solitary job of writing?” to which he replied “Yes, it would compel you to avoid it at all costs.”) being adapted by a director who famously turned a script about a CSI-esque take on Robin Hood from the perspective of the sheriff into some kind of Magna Carta origin story. Long story short, I’m excited about whatever happens with this project. I’m just as happy about the possibility of the movie as I am about the possibility of hearing a pissed off Cormac McCarthy five years from now talk about the time he got gimballed by a steakflagged strobebeacon who turned his hezzaninth godspeak into some kind of goddamned rachitic scablanded counterspectacle.