Cormac McCarthy’s Next Movie Clarified

Rumors have been abound in regards to Ridley Scott taking on Cormac McCarthy’s  screenplay The Counselor. McCarthy’s ICM agents had expected the writer to submit a new novel this past December, but they were surprised to see a script spec handed to them instead. McCarthy’s agents immediately started talking deals with The Road producers Nick Wechsler and Steve and Paula Mae Schwartz and by mid-January a deal was struck.

Criminal Complex.com vetted the rumors that Ridley Scott was aggressively perusing the project but no deal had yet been made. Author of the Criminal Complex article states, “There aren’t many directors that I would trust with something of this magnitude, even if somebody was asking what director I would trust with something of this magnitude, which nobody has or will.  In any case, Ridley Scott is one of them.  In fact, he sits even higher up the list than normal.” A number of directors had been chasing the project but it has been confirmed that Scott jumped to the head of the line and settled on directing the film in late January.

Scott is aiming for a May 1 start date for production and he has been talking to a number of high-profile actors to participate in the film that insiders are describing as “No Country For Old Men on steroids.” According to Deadline.com, Scott has been in talks with his Prometheus star, Michael Fassbender about playing the (title) role of the Counselor, however no formal offers have been made.

McCarthy’s books have been a goldmine for Hollywood lately with films such as No Country For Old Men, The Road and All The Pretty Horses. The deal for The Counselor has been on the fastest track toward production than any recent film. If production for the feature-film stays on schedule and meets its May 1^st target, it will have been six months between the time McCarthy submitted his script to his agents and when production will begin.

The Counselor is the story of a respectable lawyer who decides to try and make some money by crossing over into the drug business. The protagonist believes he can dip his toe in without getting sucked down into this dangerous world. His plan backfires and he finds himself struggling to survive and get out of a bad situation. Insiders claim that McCarthy’s The Counselor is one of his “most disturbing and powerful works” to date.

When producers bought the script, Wechsler said, “The spec falls smack in the middle of what everyone responds to with Cormac’s novels.” The Counselor is set in a rough and tumble world which is reminiscent of the world depicted in the Oscar-winning adaptation of McCarthy’s novel No Country For Old Men. Schwartz commented on the script saying “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.”

With the Scott-McCarthy team, The Counselor will surely be a must-see movie!