When two great artists get together it is a thing of beauty. So it is with great pleasure that I risk my journalistic integrity that I tell you how excited I am to bring the following news to you.
According to Deadline, Ridley Scott is in talks to direct the new spec script, The Counselor, that is being written by acclaimed American author Cormac McCarthy. Word is that Scott has been talking directly to McCarthy, and that Scott Free Entertainment will help to produce the movie along with Nick Wechsler and Steve and Paula Mae Schwartz, who helped to produce the film adaptation of McCarthy‘s latest novel, The Road.
Furthermore, odds are that this won’t be some far-off-in-the-future prospect, but Scott‘s very next project after Prometheus. Deadline speculates that this film will beat out Scott‘s other possible productions – Child 44 and “an historical epic about Gertude Bell.” That’s good news, because from what we’ve heard about the script so far, it’s not something we want to have to wait a long time for. The Counselor lives in the same territory as No Country for Old Men, and involves a lawyer who decides to dabble in the drug trade. Of course, this being a Cormac McCarthy tale, the counselor gets in too deep and struggles to extricate himself.
According to producer Steve Schwartz, there is a lot to love in this script:
“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. This may be one of McCarthy’s most disturbing and powerful works.”
Hopefully this project doesn’t follow the same trajectory as Scott‘s previously rumored run at McCarthy material. That was a rumored involvement in a film adaptation of the novel many consider McCarthy‘s violence-laden masterpiece of old-west near-fiction, Blood Meridian. That film never came to pass, but as this already exists in script form, was made to be filmed, and is currently the epicenter of a flurry of activity, odds are history won’t repeat itself.
So, am I crazy, or does all of this sound like one hell of a movie in the making?