While he’s planning to make his next movie the elderly drama These Two, it may not have always been what he would have tackled next. In an interesting piece of “what if?,” a story found by ThePlaylist tells us that Michael Haneke was once interested in adapting Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian for the screen and also has a sci-fi project waiting to get made.

The news was revealed in an interview the Austrian filmmaker did with the Austrian magazine Falter (it’s in another language, so you probably won’t be able to read it), and while it’s from a few months ago, this doesn’t seem like anything we had heard of before. Regarding Meridian, he said that executives at Warner Brothers asked him what kind of movie he would be making. In addition to telling them “a western”, he mentioned the McCarthy novel, but felt that while a great book, was “too bloody’ and that there were “too many battles…I would rather have a small film with a few cast members”. Todd Field is now in the director’s chair for the adaptation and will likely make it his next, overdue film. Still, I would have liked to see his take on it, as I think Haneke’s sparse filmmaking style would actually go quite well with McCarthy’s brief, bare-bones prose.

Regarding the sci-fi project, he claimed that he has the script in his drawer for a 12-part miniseries, which according to him “no one will make. It concerns gambling in human history, from the stone age to the beginning of the technological age”. The Playlist points out that his Palme d’Or winner The White Ribbon was originally a planned TV series whittled down to a two-and-a-half hour movie after he felt film was a better medium for the story. That movie’s large cast and thematically deep plot could have lent itself to a series, but I’m just glad we got that one at all; a similar approach to this story could possibly work, but the I also imagine the budget would need to be fairly high, at least by his standards.

What do you think of these projects? Which would you have rather (or would rather) seen?