I can think of few moments in the last decade of film that please me more than Josh Brolin crouching next to a dead Mexican in the middle of the desert, opening a briefcase stuff with cash and muttering a knowing, “yep.” In that moment Llewellyn and the audience both see into the future and know without a shadow of a doubt that no good will come of this, and yet it’s absolutely assured that he’ll wrap himself up in it.
Perhaps we have more moments like that to savor in our future, as Cormac McCarthy has written and sold a spec screenplay that is entirely new and original to the author, called The Counselor. It sounds not entirely unlike No Country…
The protagonist in The Counselor 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.
That’s the synopsis as reported by Deadline, who also have a quote from one of the trio who bought the script (and previously produced McCarthy-adaptation The Road), in which he declares The Counselor to be one of the author’s most “powerful” and “disturbing” stories yet.
“Since McCarthy himself wrote the script, we get his own muscular prose directly, with its sexual obsessions. It’s a masculine world into which, unusually, two women intrude to play leading roles. McCarthy’s wit and humor in the dialogue make the nightmare even scarier.”
There’s no team in place beyond the producers, who snapped up the script with their own cash.
While The Road is not a great film, its deficiencies come from a screenplay that is attempting to adapt a book, the merit of which is entirely predicated on the texture of the prose, rather than the plot. Hopefully with McCarthy conceiving and constructing this new story as a screenplay from the start, there will be no such hurdle this time around.
The film is set in the modern day, and takes place in the southwest, and is going to drive me nuts as I wait for more info about it to surface.
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(via JoBlo)
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“While The Road is not a great film, its deficiencies come from a screenplay that is attempting to adapt a book, the merit of which is entirely predicated on the texture of the prose, rather than the plot. Hopefully with McCarthy conceiving and constructing this new story as a screenplay from the start, there will be no such hurdle this time around.”
No Country was in fact originally written as a screenplay that McCarthy then just adapted into a novel, which could offer some insight as to why that film was so much better than The Road (although, having the Coen Brothers adapting and directing the film certainly helps as well).
I really wish the Coens would go back to the McCarthy well and adapt Blood Meridian.
They mention from time to time now that they’d like to try their hand at another western at some point, albeit it a more violent one than their version of True Grit. Perhaps you will get your wish someday?
Let me guess: he wants Bryan Cranston in the lead.
Every film should have Bryan Cranston in the lead. Even with female roles, I don’t think he’d mind.
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