What’s next for Ridley Scott after this summer’s highly-anticipated Prometheus? Deadline says the director has been speaking directly with Cormac McCarthy about stepping behind the camera on the revered author’s first spec script, a Southwestern drug story called The Counselor. Read more after the jump.
McCarthy’s novels have been turned into films before: The Road, All the Pretty Horses, and the Best Picture-winning No Country For Old Men. But they’ve always been adapted to the big screen by somebody else; The Counselor is the first feature script McCarthy has ever sold, and directing the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s screenplay is a coveted job in Hollywood.
The story follows an admired lawyer who is tempted by the drug business and ends up getting in over his head. Steve Schwartz, one of the movie’s producers, gave us a little more detail about what to expect:
Since McCarthy himself wrote the script, we get his own muscular prose directly, with its sexual obsessions. It’s a masculine world into which, unusually, two women intrude to play leading roles. McCarthy’s wit and humor in the dialogue make the nightmare even scarier. This may be one of McCarthy’s most disturbing and powerful works.
Despite the underlying feeling of sameness that has permeated his recent output, Ridley Scott is still one of the most versatile directors in Hollywood. After all, this is the same guy who brought us Thelma & Louise, Alien, Gladiator, and Matchstick Men. Though it sounds like a project more suited for the Coen Brothers, I’m still interested to see Scott’s take – and I’m even more interested to see if McCarthy is as good at writing screenplays as novels.
