Cormac McCarthy’s magnum opus has finally found a director; John Hillcoat, who previously adapted McCarthy’s most popular work, ‘The Road’ (2009). Aside from this, only two other of McCarthy’s oeuvre have made it to production and release, firstly the Best Picture winning ‘No Country For Old Men’ (Dir. Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007) and James Franco’s poorly received ‘Child of God’ (2013).
McCarthy’s haunting novel takes place after the American-Mexican war and follows an unnamed protagonist, ‘the kid’ who joins a band of scalp hunters operating along the American-Mexican border hunting down Native Americans. McCarthy explores the warped and nihilistic values of 'the Glanton gang' as their bloodthirsty urges take hold, committing a range of atrocities against both innocents and aggressors, leaving total devastation in their wake.
Blood Meridian doesn’t follow a conventional narrative structure but instead opts to lay out the events of the novel in a blunt and affectless style, interspersing them with philosophical musings on religion and dominion, the primal nature of man, ethics of war and violence as well as race relations in a landscape of vapid amorality.
The predicament between paying respect to McCarthy's source material and the desire to market an engaging product for a wide audience may damage the artistic integrity of the book and film.
This approach has cemented Blood Meridian as one of the most highly decorated pieces of American fiction as well as the one of the most graphic, with its irredeemable characters and unrelenting violence against all manner of people making it a difficult text to greenlight for adaptation. The predicament between paying respect to McCarthy's source material and the desire to market an engaging product for a wide audience may damage the artistic integrity of the book and film. Because of this, some have regarded the book to be ‘unfilmable’.
The proposed film has, for decades, lingered in a state of creative disarray. Directors such as Lynne Ramsay, Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone and Michael Haneke have been previously attached to the project but to no avail. Tommy Lee Jones and Ridley Scott penned scripts for the adaptation, the former only adapting the first 1/3 of the novel before quitting and the latter’s script was decried for being too overly graphic in its depiction of violence. James Franco filmed 25 minutes of footage out of his own pocket to try and visualize what an adaptation could look like – this test footage can be viewed on YouTube - but nothing ever developed further from this.
Hillcoat’s prior affiliation with McCarthy’s prose makes him a rational choice to take the mantle of adapting such a complex and historically ‘unfilmable text’ despite his lesser-known directorial pursuits. Blood Meridian, however, will undoubtedly be a difficult tale to transfer to script, and an even more complex script to put to screen due to the complexity of its source material. Its reputation has undoubtedly made it a daunting task.
As of now, little is known about the production aside from Hillcoat as Director, New Regency as the Production Company as well as McCarthy himself alongside his son as Executive Producers.