With just three screenplays under his belt, former “Sons of Anarchy” actor, Taylor Sheridan has built up quite the cinematic voice in these last three years. It all started with Denis Villeneuve‘s “Sicario,” which relied heavily on atmosphere, its landscape-lush wide screen shots, and gloomy themes to give us an insider look into the FBI’s futile fight against the Mexican drug cartel. Its bow at Cannes came with a standing ovation and positive reviews, most of which highlighted Villeneuve’s direction, but neglected Sheridan’s tightly constructed screenplay. With David Mackenzie‘s “Hell or High Water” released the following year and, again, becoming a Cannes sensation, it seems like people started noticing the Sheridan-effect. “Hell or High Water” was, more or less, following a similar structure as “Sicario,” what was starting to develop was the voice of an “auteur.”
Our suspicions of a potential “auteur” in the making were confirmed this past January when Sheridan debuted “Wind River” at the Sundance Film Festival. It, again, had the same structure as his previous two screenplays, or as he describes it a “five-act structure and a five-act structure within that,” and, might I mention, another dialogue-heavy epilogue that tied the given film’s themes together. However, this time around Sheridan was front and center in the director’s chair, there was no place to hide, and he delivered a gritty, albeit flawed, film that further cemented his place as one of the most promising writers currently working in the industry.
Now comes word that he and, his “Wind River” star, Jeremy Renner are re-teaming for a limited series on gambler, dentist, but more importantly. legendary gunslinger Doc Holiday’s life. Speaking to Collider‘s Matt Goldberg Jeremy had this to say about the upcoming project:
“Yeah. And then Taylor and I are talking about doing a cable limited series of the origin story of Doc Holliday.”
Holiday has been portrayed plenty of times at the movies, Dennis Quaid was a decent Holiday in “Wyatt Earp,” but I’ll always love best Val Kilmer‘s scene-stealing, career-peaking portrayal in 1993’s “Tombstone,” which had the actor brilliantly lay down witticisms one minute and then have you take him seriously the next. It was a brilliant performance in tonal change and he deserved an Oscar nomination that year.
Back to Sheridan, he doesn’t just have “Doc Holiday” coming up, he is also currently working on the screenplay for “Soldado,” a sequel to “Sicario,” a film which he recently described to Collider as making “Sicario look like a comedy.” It seems like he hasn’t lost his knack for tackling the darkest possibilities of the human psyche in his screenplays, but why would anybody want him to stop doing that?