You can’t keep a muddy, dirty, sweat-drenched filmmaker down. John Hillcoat, fresh off the collapse of his Prohibition-era crime drama “The Promised Land,” says his next film will possibly be the previously-reported frontier western actioner “The Revenant.” In an interview with New York Magazine regarding the short film he directed for the video game “Red Dead Redemption” that airs on Fox tonight (trailer below), he doesn’t mention the name of the project, but he says about his next offering, “I’ve got another potential western, though it’s more of an action frontier film, going back in time in the early 1800s when a third of America was even unmapped and unexplored terrain.”
“The Revenant,” based on the novel by Michael Punke, was adapted by Mark L. Smith into, oddly enough, a star vehicle for Samuel L. Jackson. It made the Black List of 2007, with “Oldboy” director Park Chan-wook circling, but it hasn’t gotten any heat until this predictably morose combo package of Hillcoat and po-faced Christian Bale climbed aboard. “The Revenant” tells the story of an 1820s frontiersman, Hugh Glass, on a path of vengeance against those who left him for dead after a bear mauling. That gagging sound you hear is Bale already preparing his diet for the ridiculous amount of weight he’s sure to lose for the role. The basic idea sounds ripe, and Hillcoat has experience with the theme of bleak, bleak revenge, but hasn’t this movie been done before? Hm, perhaps in “Man In The Wilderness” starring Richard Harris, about a 19th century frontiersmen who pursues the friends that left him for dead after a bear attack? That movie, for the record, is currently available on Netflix’s “Watch It Now” feature.
Hillcoat also mentions a “contemporary….crime thriller, set in Hong Kong and Macao” that is on his plate of potential projects (update: we now know what this is).. He also throws his hat into the ring for a science fiction film, saying simply “I would love to do a sci-fi” but the interviewer doesn’t press him for details so it’s unknown if he has any particular project(s) in mind. This adds to his growing list of potential projects, including an adaptation of Nick Cave’s novel “The Death Of Bunny Munro” with UK TV in development, a film about the legendary NY cop Joe Petrosino with Benicio Del Toro attached and Pete Dexter writing, and a similar sounding titled “Mob Cops” with ‘Sopranos’ writer Terrence Winter in the works. On top of that, Hillcoat was also in talks to remake 1973 French heist film “La Bonne Année” with ‘Road’ scribe Joe Penhall and actor Daniel Craig. The status of these projects is unknown, and could very well switch things up at any moment.
As usual, whether or not “The Revenant” can make it into production remains to be seen. “The Promised Land” had attracted the likes of Shia Labeouf, Ryan Gosling, Scarlett Johansson, Paul Dano, Amy Adams and Michael Shannon but still couldn’t get financing together to get it in front of cameras. And while Christian Bale is a big name to have in front of the picture, outside of Batman films, he’s still an unknown quantity, and Westerns in generals are very hard sells. The project is currently in the production stable of Anonymous Content (“Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind,” “Babel”) so hopefully they can get this one rolling.