Ridley Scott To Direct Brutal Western Thriller WRAITHS OF THE BROKEN LAND
Holy crap. This is the biggest movie news of the day for me.
According to Deadline, Ridley Scott is reteaming with The Martian writer Drew Goddard for a western thriller called Wraiths of the Broken Land.
After Bone Tomahawk blew me away last year (it went on to become my favorite film of 2015), I wanted to read more from writer/director S. Craig Zahler, who I thought did a superb job with crafting that script. Bone Tomahawk was Zahler's directorial debut, but he's also a novelist, and one of the first things I read after seeing BT was his novel Wraiths of the Broken Land, a brutal western about a man hired to help save two kidnapped sisters who have been sold into prostitution to a ruthless Mexican gang leader. It's nearly as unflinching as Bone Tomahawk was, but I thought we'd never see Wraiths adapted into a film — mainly because when I interviewed Zahler, he essentially said as much:
"So it was suggested that I adapt Wraiths of the Broken Land, which is the second of my western novels, and I said, ‘That thing is big and I don’t want to chop it down so it fits a movie length. I’d need to remove two thirds of this book so it could be a movie. But I can write another western that’s another rescue mission western.' And that other western was Bone Tomahawk."
Having read the book, I see what he means. There's a lot happening in the book, and it'll be interesting to see how Goddard adapts this, since it appears Zahler won't have any involvement with this movie adaptation at all. Here's the official synopsis:
A brutal and unflinching tale that takes many of its cues from both cinema and pulp horror, Wraiths of the Broken Land is like no Western you've ever seen or read. Desperate to reclaim two kidnapped sisters who were forced into prostitution, the Plugfords storm across the badlands and blast their way through Hell. This gritty, character-driven piece will have you by the throat from the very first page and drag you across sharp rocks for its unrelenting duration. Prepare yourself for a savage Western experience that combines elements of Horror, Noir and Asian ultra-violence. You've been warned.