A month or so ago it came to light that The Road's John Hillcoat was hoping to get an adaptation of Matt Bondurant's prohibition-set novel The Wettest Country in the World up and running. No paperwork had been signed, but he was reported as having the support of Ryan Gosling, Shia LaBeouf, Scarlet Johansson and Paul Dano, who all wanted to be in it.

Along with confirmation of that from the horse's mouth (well, Hillcoat's) Atomic Popcorn have just learned that a script has already been written, by a certain Mr Nick Cave.

Cave dabbled with film as an actor in the 90s, with roles in Johnny Suede and Ghosts of the Civil Dead, but after a long hiatus during which he seemed to leave the cinema well alone, he's made a slight return in recent years, writing the music, along with constant collaborator and Bad Seed Warren Ellis, for The Assassination of Jesse James and The Road, and both score and screenplay for Hillcoat's Australian western The Proposition.

The Wettest Country in the World, a family crime drama described by Hillcoat as "Virginia, moonshine, backwoods..." seems to be a great fit for Cave, who's always had an affinity for America's mythic past, and with script and potential cast in place, this now seems likely to go ahead in the not- too-distant future. Hillcoat is slightly cagey though: "it's in the middle of all sorts of stuff". We guess the performance of The Road will have some bearing on what happens next.

Hillcoat also mentions a possible small-screen version of Cave's recent second novel The Death of Bunny Munro, about a travelling salesman having a meltdown on a road-trip across Brighton. "We’re going to try and wake up the BBC or Channel 4," he says. "We’re trying to say to British television, look at HBO. I mean what the hell are you doing?”