11/2/2022 0 Comments Blood meridianI had recently made a film about the poet Hart Crane, who lived in New York in the 1920s. If Tommy Lee Jones couldn’t do it and Ridley Scott couldn’t do it-Scorsese and Oliver Stone were even rumored to have attempted it-how could I? But maybe those guys were making it too big. I dreamed about adapting that film, never thinking that it would happen. But if you could take Brando’s Kurtz character and throw in Nicholson’s smile, then yes, baby. I see the Judge as Marlon Brando circa Apocalypse Now. He also said that he had talked to Nicholson about playing the Judge. But of all the scripts-the later one by Monahan, Oscar-winning writer of The Departed-Tommy’s was the most loyal. In fact, Tommy’s script wasn’t just like the book because it was only the first third or so. “I was going to make it just like the book,” he said, “but studios get a little scared when a black guy cuts off a white guy’s head and the shooting jets of blood douse the fire. #Blood meridian movie#When I asked him about his attempts to make Blood Meridian, Tommy said that ultimately he couldn’t make the movie because it was too violent. Over lunch, Tommy told us that he would, the next day, go visit Cormac at his house in Santa Fe. He showed us a picture of a mangled pile of flesh and clothing that had-five minutes before the picture was taken-been a man. #Blood meridian professional#I spent a lunch with Tommy, along with the other young actors, some with no professional experience because they had been hired for their military experience-one had actually killed in Afghanistan. I was cast opposite Tommy Lee Jones for two days in a great but little-seen film by Paul Haggis shot in New Mexico about violent Iraq war veterans. Maybe it would work on stage-I think the Steppenwolf Theatre Company put it on decades before. One thing about McCarthy is his great descriptions of nature, and in this play, all that energy is infused into the dialogue-the dialogue has to carry the weight that the description in books like Blood Meridian does. It was just too hard to make the film feel dynamic with all that dialogue. #Blood meridian tv#He also directed a strange but valiantly attempted TV movie based on McCarthy’s two-character play called The Sunset Limited. He was a close friend of McCarthy’s-maybe because of his attempt at making this very project-and later would act in a McCarthy film, the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men. Tommy Lee Jones came closest to making it, I think. There were discarded screenplays from dead adaptation attempts scattered about Los Angeles even back when I was an up-and-coming actor. I have always dreamed of adapting Cormac McCarthy’s great novel into film.
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