“The Road” and “The Proposition” filmmaker John Hillcoat has revealed he has worked with Cormac McCarthy himself to turn bring the latter’s iconic novel “Blood Meridian” to the big screen.
Just over a month ago came the news that Hillcoat had been hired by New Regency to direct the film based on the Pulitzer Prize winning author’s darkest and most violent Western.
Widely considered one of the greatest works of American literature, the 1985 book follows a 14-year-old Tennesseean’s experience with a group of scalp hunters who massacred Native Americans and others in the United States-Mexico borderlands for bounty, pleasure, and eventually out of compulsion.
Talking to The Playlist’s Bingeworthy podcast, Hillcoat revealed one key reason he got the job – he’s working on the screenplay for the film alongside McCarthy himself:
“[Cormac McCarthy] has become a dear, dear close friend. And over the years, we discussed how he had lost control of ‘Blood Meridian,’ and it was a mutual task to get it back because he knew how to crack it. A lot of people have tried without his input.”
Hillcoat also says a project on this scale needed time to gestate:
“It has really been having the space to discuss it over a decade or more. Actually, I think it’s fifteen years we’ve been discussing it. That allowed it to come forth, and I wouldn’t let go.”
Hillcoat also says McCarthy genuinely understands the difference between the two different mediums of novel and film and “the best you can do is capture the spirit of each”.
Hillcoat and Keith Redmon will produce, whilst McCarthy and his son, John Francis McCarthy, will serve as executive producers.
The likes of Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, Tommy Lee Jones, Todd Field, Michael Haneke and James Franco were all attached to earlier attempts to produce the film with none making it before the cameras.
