Lately much has been made about Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 Western novel “Blood Meridian,” which centers on a nameless teenage runaway in the American Southwest who falls in with a group of bounty-hunting scalp hunters who massacred Indians in the mid 19th century. In several corners it’s been called a type of nightmarish Western horror.
And today “The Road” director John Hillcoat said in his AV Club interview that he made “The Proposition” when he couldn’t actually get the rights to the novel.
“So when I couldn’t get [the film rights to] Blood Meridian, I started looking at a new way of telling a frontier story, and that’s what drew me to the Australian frontier.”
McCarthy himself recently said he thinks the novel is filmable despite the opinions of several pundits who think otherwise. “The fact that’s it’s a bleak and bloody story has nothing to do with whether or not you can put it on the screen,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “That’s not the issue. The issue is it would be very difficult to do and would require someone with a bountiful imagination and a lot of balls. But the payoff could be extraordinary.”
Hillcoat — who uhhh, directed McCarthy’s “The Road” — said he would be “absolutely” interested in tackling the novel if he got the chance, but notes that he thinks it would be nearly impossible to make properly in the climate the industry’s in right now.
AVC: If you could get the rights to Blood Meridian now, would you still be interested in adapting it?
JH: Well I certainly think that there’s something about the American frontier where there’s—I mean absolutely. I think it’s a tricky one, it really is. In this climate of the industry right now, I think it would be pretty well impossible to make that film. If I had The Road land in my lap right now, even if it was already published, it won the Pulitzer Prize, and Oprah just did her interview with Cormac, this film could not be made now.
So the issue, as Cormac would say, is not that McCarthy and Hillcoat aren’t on the same page (last we all heard Scott Rudin owns rights and director Todd Field is adapting — Ridley Scott was once attached — but that was a year ago and there’s been little movement since), it’s probably that no one’s going to foot the bill for a dark violent, and nihilistic Western that the author has said is about pure “human evil” (Rudin? Field? retorts? It’s been too quiet).
Then again, it looks like Hillcoat, is going to pull-off a 1930s bootlegging tale —”The Wettest County In The World” possibly with Ryan Gosling and Shia LaBeouf — which isn’t exactly an easy sell either, so maybe anything is possible.
Meanwhile, a recent L.A. Times article says Andrew Dominik (‘The Assassination of Jesse James’) who was once interested in adapting “Cities of the Plain,” the final volume of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Border Trilogy” is also interested in adapting “The Crossing” which is volume two in that same trilogy. Hmm, if “Cities of the Plain” fell through, would he really move on to book two or does the LAT have their wires crossed? So we’ll just put it out there. What’s up with Todd Field and ‘Meridian.’ Has this stalled? Has he moved on? We can’t quite remember where that one netted out. Someone supply some information already. Field’s last movie was “Little Children” in 2006.
