So far, Hollywood has been slightly reticent when it’s come to bringing the dense, poetic, often bleak but always brilliant work of novelist Cormac McCarthy to the big screen, with only Billy Bob Thornton’s ambitious but unsuccessful All The Pretty Horses done and dusted.
Now, though, the floodgates have opened. Kind of. The Coen Brothers’ eagerly-awaited adaptation of No Country For Old Men is scheduled for release later in the year (and rumour has it that it might show up in Cannes), while it was today announced that John Hillcoat, director of the McCarthy-esque Western, The Proposition, will call the shots on an adaptation of McCarthy’s most recent novel, The Road.
A (very) dark but moving post-apocalyptic tale of a father’s attempts to save his son, body and soul, in the aftermath of a cataclysmic event (nuclear strike? Asteroid hit? It’s never made clear) that regresses mankind into violent primitivism, The Road is one of McCarthy’s most cinematic offerings, so it’s no surprise to see it snapped up so soon after release. (It has been a surprise, though, to see it snapped up by The Oprah Winfrey Book Club as its latest choice – McCarthy will appear on TV for the first time ever when he records an appearance on a forthcoming Oprah episode. YouTube surely beckons!)
The Road not only has two great roles and set-piece potential – the father and son are dogged by marauding cannibals as they try to make their way towards the sea – but the grim landscapes of an ash-choked world should offer Hillcoat stunning visual possibilities. Joe Penhall will write the script. It could be in cinemas by late 2008, we reckon.
Now that Hollywood is seemingly gripped with McCarthy fever, Empire is quietly hopeful that Sir Ridley Scott will finally get the chance to bring McCarthy’s undoubted masterpiece, the extraordinarily violent yet poetic Western, Blood Meridian, to the big screen. He’s been trying for years, but it’s proved a tough nut to crack, script-wise. But, as they say, things often come in threes, so now would seem to be the time. Fingers crossed, people! Fingers crossed!