Michael Fassbender, William H. Macy and Thomas Haden Church will star in David Jacobson’s adaptation of Matthew F. Jones thriller “A Single Shot.”
Adapted for the screen by author Jones, the film will center on poacher John Moon (Fassbender) who finds himself on the run with a suitcase full of money, a target on his head and hardened killers on his tail. Here’s the Amazon synopsis for Jones’ novel with a comparison to the works of pulp writer Jim Thompson, who also provided the source material for Michael Winterbottom’s “The Killer Inside Me”;
Abandoned by his wife and young son, John Moon sits in his trailer on the mountainside, feeling abused by the world. All he has left is an acre-and-a-half of the family farm, and he makes do with odd jobs and poaching game off state land. One morning he goes hunting a deer out of season and winds up killing a young runaway instead. In trying to hide the evidence of his accidental crime, Moon finds a huge sum of money, plus evidence that the young girl was not alone. Will Moon’s crime be discovered? What will be the consequences for him and his family?
The action in the novel takes place in the span of just seven days, and Moon’s inevitable mental deterioration in the face of his horrible crime lends force to the narrative. Jones has fashioned a compelling and readable story of one man’s struggle with enormous guilt and his inability to make things go right in a world determined to make him fail. The mood is bleak, and the ending poetically just. This is not a comfortable novel to read, but it is a powerful one that deserves a wide readership. Highly recommended for all fiction collections
It sounds like yet another interesting role for Fassbender whose rise to a certified Hollywood leading man seemingly stems from his small role in Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds.” Lensing on “A Single Shot” begins this summer, presumably after Fassbender is done with David Cronenberg’s “A Dangerous Method,” which stars Viggo Mortensen, Keira Knightley and Vincent Cassell and goes in front of cameras in Berlin, Vienna and Zurich this May.
