One of our most-anticipated upcoming films is John Hillcoat‘s The Wettest County In The World. We were unsure if it would go into production, but it indeed has and the cast is unbelievable. For his follow-up to The Road, Hillcoat has assembled Tom Hardy, Shia LaBeouf, Jessica Chastain, Gary Oldman, Mia Wasikowska, Guy Pearce, and Jason Clarke.
The period tale followers the bootlegging brothers Bondurant brothers and we have the first photos of one of them, LaBeouf, from Shiantology (via /Film). It’s nice to see LaBeouf fit “smaller” films in between his blockbusters like Transformers: Dark of the Moon. The same goes for Tom Hardy, who will be shooting Christopher Nolan‘s The Dark Knight Rises after this. I liked The Road, but it was a film I never have the desire to watch again due to the utterly bleak nature. Hillcoat seems to be lightening things up a bit here. Check out the similar photos above and below.
Synopsis:
In 1928, a pair of thieves accost Bondurant’s real life great-uncle Forrest at his Franklin County, Va., restaurant. They’re after a large cache of bootlegging money and end up cutting Forrest’s throat. The story of his survival and his trek to a hospital 12 miles away has taken on mythical proportions by the time Sherwood Anderson arrives in Franklin County in 1934 to research a magazine piece on the area’s prolific moonshiners. Soon after Anderson’s arrival, two anonymous men appear at the same hospital, one with legs meticulously shattered from ankle to hip, the other one castrated, with the by-products of the deed deposited in a jar of moonshine. The arc of the story lies between the attack on Forrest and that on the two men.
The Wettest County in the World doesn’t have a confirmed release date, but expect late this year or sometime in 2012.
What do you think of LaBeouf’s look?