As I’ve said, numerous times, if you’re adapting “Blood Meridian” then you best not miss. Everybody knows that. The late, great Cormac McCarthy’s masterfully violent 1985 novel is a tough read but also an essential American novel. It’s surely the author’s magnum opus.
Hillcoat learned that the hard way when, in 2009, he directed an adaptation of McCarthy’s “The Road,” a film that was met with mixed reviews, mostly due to the fact that the landmark novel’s presence loomed largely all over that film.
Last June, Hillcoat announced that he would be bringing “Blood Meridian” to the big screen, with McCarthy co-writing the screenplay. Sadly, the author passed away before he could put his stamp on the movie. However, in a new interview, Hillcoat says that he and McCarthy had, over the course of a few years, “three- and five-hour lunches” brainstorming how the iconic novel could be turned into a film.
This brainstorming would almost "always lapse back to the logistics: dialogue, casting, the landscapes.” McCarthy died before he could contribute to the actual screenplay, but Hillcoat is now approaching the shape of the film “with years of notes,” and from “hours and hours of conversations.”
A major challenge for McCarthy and Hillcoat was how to depict the Judge character in the novel, a violent, huge, pale and hairless man, almost supernatural in nature, who is a recorder of the natural world:
The way the Judge, for instance, speaks in the book. Those incredible, long, philosophical monologues: you couldn’t just replicate that, onscreen. Because if a character physically embodies the Judge, and says every word from the monologue in the book, the viewer would be taken out of the film. It would be like a Shakespeare adaptation [including] the whole [text]. So Cormac understood that the judge would have to say less.
Earlier this year, it was reported that John Logan (“Skyfall,” “The Aviator”) would write the screenplay, replacing McCarthy and using the author’s “guiding principles” throughout the writing process with Hillcoat. Although the script is still being written, the film is being described as in “pre-production” by Hillcoat, which means we might be hearing about casting very soon.
“Blood Meridian” is a horrifying read, but a necessary one. It’s a sprawling exploration of violence and depravity in the American West. Scalpings, sexual assaults, and pedophilia show up. There have been multiple attempts to adapt the novel into a film: Tommy Lee Jones, Ridley Scott, Todd Field and even James Franco attempted to direct a film adaptation in the ‘90s and ‘00s, but none have managed to get it this far into the production process as Hillcoat has.
Some have succeeded in adapting other McCarthy novels for the screen — the most notable example would be Joel and Ethan Coen’s “No Country For Old Men.” Hillcoat’s adaptation of “The Road” falls somewhere in the middle. I’m not a fan of Hillcoat tackling more McCarthy. If you’re going to adapt “Blood Meridian,” then you need a trusted master. It needs to be in safe hands. It’s too sacred.