After the hugely disappointing collapse of his promising Prohibition crime-drama, “The Promised Land,” we feared it might be a while until we heard from Australian director John Hillcoat again.
The project was supposed to start shooting in February with a star-studded cast loosely attached including the likes of Ryan Gosling, Shia Labeouf, Scarlett Johansson, Paul Dano, Michael Shannon and Toby Kebbell before it all tragically fell apart late last year.
While Hillcoat is still yet to get back on his feet with a concrete project, scribe Mark L. Smith has revealed that the director is attached to direct his period-revenge-actioner,”The Revenant,” with Christian Bale in talks to lead. It’s not exactly a promising sign when the writer’s past films include the ‘Vacancy’ franchise and “The Hole 3D” though very few details are provided of the project beside the fact Anonymous Content are producing with the aforementioned talent attached.
According to CHUD, the film may simply be a rehash of an old Park Chan-wook and Samuel L. Jackson project, itself an adaptation of Michael Punke’s novel of the same name centering on 1820’s story of a frontiersman, Hugh Glass, on a path of vengeance against those who left him for dead after a bear mauling. The period tale sounds kind of perfect for Hillcoat — with his 2005 film “The Proposition” exploring a similar time period only in the Australian outback — as does the lead role for Bale.
We got our fingers crossed that, firstly, this isn’t just a screenwriter shooting his mouth off and that both talent mentioned are actually involved and do eventually come on. Neither have too much on their immediate schedule either; later this year, Bale has his reunion with Terrence Malick on an untitled romantic drama with Javier Bardem, Olga Kurylenko and Rachel McAdams as well as a return to the batsuit sometime next year but seems fairly open while, as we mentioned, Hillcoat’s calendar looks fairly blank for now aside from reportedly developing a U.K. television mini-series adaptation of Nick Cave’s “The Death of Bunny Munro.”