Skyfall writer John Logan is gonna try to adapt Blood Meridian, god bless him
Logan is the latest writer to attempt to adapt Cormac McCarthy's infamously tricky and bloody Western novel
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People have been trying, for at least 20 years, to turn Cormac McCarthy’s Western opus Blood Meridian into a movie—and every single one of them has failed. Big names, too: Ridley Scott moved heaven or hell to try to get the movie made in the 2000s, and Tommy Lee Jones, who would later star in the Coens’ adaptation of McCarthy’s less nihilistic and bloody—if only by comparison—No Country For Old Men, even tried to touch up a version of a screenplay himself a few years prior. McCarthy always pushed back on the idea that his book was fundamentally “unfilmable,” but the fact is that the novel is so rooted in the human impulse for violence that every studio who’s been asked to tackle the material has ultimately balked.
Last year, though, we reported that New Regency was taking another stab at it, tapping John Hillcoat (who’d previously adapted a crowd-pleasing version of McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road) to adapt the story of The Kid, the Glanton Gang, and the evils they perpetrate on, and as part of, the American West. Now, Deadline reports that a writer has officially been brought in to bring McCarthy’s blend of lush descriptions and terse, elliptical prose to the screen, with Skyfall and Spectre screenwriter John Logan taking on the gig.
Logan has had a long and interesting career, including making his directorial debut last year, with the LGBTQ+-focused slasher film They/Them. His Sam Mendes Bond flicks have been among his most successful outings as a screenwriter, but he’s got a long track record writing for some of the biggest names in the business, including Martin Scorsese (with The Aviator and Hugo) and Scott himself (having penned the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Gladiator, among others). He certainly has the bona fides to at least try to get Blood Meridian cut down into a movie, although none of the things that have made the book nigh-impossible to adapt over the last 3 decades have gone away in the meantime—its relentless grimness, its queasy fascination with violence and depravity, or its willingness to leave certain key moments horrifically just out-of-frame.
As we noted the last time this project came up, though, there’s an even more intriguing question lurking out in the tall grass now: Who will Hillcoat find to play the book’s most irresistible character, the hairless, charming, endlessly malevolent Judge Holden? You could argue that Stellan Skarsgård put in a hell of an audition with his work in the recent Dune films, but it’s going to be a bloodbath out there, as Hollywood’s upper-tier character actors battle it out for the juicy, monstrous part.
17 Comments
Star Trek Nemesis Ruiner to Ruin Blood Meridian.John Logan is truly the Akiva Goldsman of Star Trek.What’s that? They what now?
I mean, you get Nick Cave to write this and do the score right? Because Skyfall and Spectre doesn’t fill me with confidence.
yeah, i feel like The Proposition is more of an audition for this film than The Road was, weirdly enough. get Cave & Hillcoat back together and give em a decent budget
It would work better as a limited series than a film. It needs room to breathe and for moments to land.
yeah this is a story where a lot happens, even if it doesn’t take up much textspace. The writer can probably trim back some of it, but they really risk narrowing the scope.But really this is all related to the problem where they could faithfully adapt what happens in the book but totally miss the tone, which is very much connected to McCarthy’s prose.
His style is fascinating as I always dislike it, until the moment I find the ‘groove’ of it and then can’t stop reading until it’s over. Out of the three books I’ve read by him, this one took the longest to “take”, but was ultimately my favorite of the three.
Yeah, did you happen to see the Nick Cage version of Butcher’s Crossing (a novel that is often compared to Blood Merdian)? It had the events of the book mostly there but it just didn’t have the right tone.
This touches on my feelings as well. Blood Meridian was a hard book for me to get through. I’d read a bit, it would get meandering, I’d wanna put it down, but then suddenly I’d get totally drawn into a passage that just described something in insane levels of detail that would bring me right back into it. Not sure how well someone could translate something like that into visuals that do it justice.
I would love to see the Coen brothers attempt this – either as a movie or a limited series – if for no other reason than to add a few laughs to an otherwise grim tale.
You could argue that Stellan Skarsgård put in a hell of an audition with his work in the recent Dune filmsHuh, I think we have very different interpretations of how the character comes off. I always pictured someone like Wilford Brimley.
WEIRD—me too!!! Brimley with that sinister undertone he had in moments of The Thing and even (to a lesser degree, of course) Cocoon is what I was picturing in my head throughout this book.
I dunno is it weird though? Or is the judge someone who presents as “ideal grandpa with all the answers” until you realize too late what’s really going on?
I always pictured the Judge as a large, menacing man, not so much of a fatherly figure like Brimley…I imagine someone with the physicality of Dave Bautista.
hey man, you do you. Far be it from me to tell you you are wrong.What sticks with me is that everyone agrees they’ve met him before. And then he appears when they are at there most desperate. creating gunpowder out of natural resources while at the same time showing how you weaponize death. I dunno he needs to seem like a saviour, at first.
“Crowd Pleasing” and “The Road” (in any form) are definitely not a thing. It’s like calling “Schindler’s List” a crowd pleaser. It was fine but couldn’t ever hold the gravitas of the book–there just wasn’t a possibility that it could.
Six episodes, one hour each. There ya go.