It was more than 18 months ago that we learned John Hillcoat will adapt Blood Meridian, perhaps our era’s quintessential piece of cinema-defying material. What’s eluded a list of auteurs from notable (Todd Field) to intriguing (Tommy Lee Jones) to YMMV (Ridley Scott) to Dear God (James Franco) had now fallen to a director most, regardless their opinion on his films, would call a journeyman––a journeyman who also earned Cormac McCarthy’s blessing as executive producer and one-time screenwriting volunteer. The time since has seen its author’s passing and (notwithstanding John Logan joining as scribe) little else on Hillcoat’s project.
Credit goes to Alexander Sorondo, who’s penned a five-part investigation into McCarthy’s later years on his Substack big reader bad grades. Reading requires a $5 subscription that’s more than worth the price of admission––safe to say the reclusive novelist has rarely seemed so available. (Yes, including this.) For his series, Sorondo spoke with Hillcoat about McCarthy’s vision for his (really, their) Blood Meridian film. And not a miniseries, as many have suggested: per Hillcoat, McCarthy considered cinema home to “an element of spectacle” with a “kind of grandeur about it, an element of… scale to it that streaming… doesn’t [have].” Finding films are often too long, the novelist considered it essential that this Blood Meridian work on the basis of reduction: where Judge Holden spoke in long, ornate, eloquent monologues on paper, his onscreen rendition would be a man of fewer words, and to Hillcoat fell the challenge of meeting McCarthy’s ambition in distillation.
As Hillcoat elaborated:
“For [McCarthy] it was [a story about] the kid… meeting the gang, and the gang’s journey, and then of course… this Faustian tale, the journey of the judge trying to win the soul of the kid, and consume everything in his path.”
The author and filmmaker hashed out possible paths (“dialogue, casting, the landscapes alone”) in conversations running up to five hours. While McCarthy passed before he could properly pen a script, Hillcoat claims “years of notes” offer “guiding principles” for the work he and Logan take to now––an unenviable task and, assuming it’s ever completed, not one of which we’d see fruits (or otherwise) for some time longer. But for its potential as the great author’s last will and testament, its import increases tenfold.