As we head towards Cannes in the next couple of weeks, there's a pleasing upsurge in announcements about indie projects packing their bags for the Festival to secure much-coveted deals. One that, in a perfect world, should have no problem at all is The Man On Carrion Road**, which stems from a new deal between Atlas Independent and Relativity International. Timothy Olyphant will star in the "visceral" thriller.
The story, which sounds very much like a modern-day Western, involves a botched Mexican cartel deal on the back streets of a US border town. Newly-appointed Sheriff Olyphant teams up with his predecessor to take down the bad guys and clean up the town.
This is not, it's safe to say, unknown territory for the excellent Olyphant, who's now probably best known as Marshall Raylan Givens in TV's brilliant Justified, and before that was, for a time, the sheriff of Deadwood. While he's killed it on TV time and again however, he's perhaps never had quite such good fortune on the big screen, suffering through the likes of Scream 2, Die Hard 4.0, I Am Number 4, and Hitman, where he played Agent 47. Maybe he just needs to avoid projects where there are numbers anywhere involved.
Nils Lyew wrote the Carrion Road screenplay, and the director is Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego, who's currently in post-production on Open Grave with Sharlto Copley. He'll start shooting with Olyphant in Medellin, Colombia in August.