Ridley Scott talks about Cormac McCarthy's Western, Blood Meridian, and Tripoli

Ridley Scott has been interviewed by Empire magazine recently. He spoke about Body of Lies but also gave some news about his adaption of Cormac McCarthy's Western, Blood Meridian, and the difficulties of adapting a book that is steeped in violence and which deals with seriously un-PC topics.

"It's written. I think it's a really tricky one, and maybe it's something that should be left as a novel. If you're going to do Blood Meridian you've got to go the whole nine yards into the blood bath, and there's no answer to the blood bath, that's part of the story, just the way it is and the way it was. When you start to scalp Mexican wedding parties that'll draw the line. One scalp of coarse black hair is pretty well either Mexican or Indian, and there was no difference to the scalp hunters in Arizona at that time, who didn't draw the line."

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West is a 1985 novel by Cormac McCarthy. Wiki states, "The novel tells the story of a teenage runaway named only as "the kid", who was born in Tennessee during the famously active Leonids meteor shower of 1833. He first meets the enormous and hairless Judge Holden at a religious revival in Nacogdoches, Texas: Holden falsely accuses the preacher, Reverend Green, of pedophilia and intercourse with a goat and incites a mob to chase him out of town.

After a violent encounter with a bartender establishes the kid as a formidable fighter, he joins a party of ill-armed U.S. Army irregulars on a filibustering mission led by a Captain White. Shortly after entering Mexico, they are attacked and massacred by a band of Comanche warriors. Few of them survive. Arrested as a filibuster in Chihuahua, the kid is set free when his acquaintance Toadvine tells the authorities they will make useful Indian hunters for the state's newly hired scalphunting operation. They join Glanton and his gang, and the bulk of the novel is devoted to detailing their activities and conversations. The gang encounters a traveling carnival, and, in untranslated Spanish, each of their fortunes is told with Tarot cards. The gang originally contract with various regional leaders to protect locals from marauding Apaches, and are given a bounty for each scalp they recover. Before long, however, they devolve into the outright murder of unthreatening Indians, unprotected Mexican villages, and eventually even the Mexican army and anyone else who crosses their path.

Throughout the novel Holden is presented as a profoundly mysterious and awe-inspiring figure; the others seem to regard him as not quite human. Like the historical Holden of Samuel Chamberlain's autobiography, he is a child-killer, though almost no one in the gang expresses much distress at his committing these acts. According to the kid's new companion Ben Tobin, an "ex-priest", the Glanton gang first met the judge while fleeing for their lives from a much larger Apache group. In the middle of a blasted desert, they found Holden sitting on an enormous boulder, where he seemed to be waiting for the gang. They agreed to follow his leadership, and he took them to an extinct volcano, where, astoundingly, he instructed the ragged, desperate gang on how to manufacture gunpowder, enough to give them the advantage against the Apaches. When the kid remembers seeing Holden in Nacogdoches, Tobin tells the kid that each man in the gang claims to have met the judge before he joined forces with Glanton."

Scott also passed on a few tidbits about the background and setting for another proposed film, Tripoli, a William "Kingdom of Heaven" Monaghan-scripted tale of high adventure in 19th century North Africa, as a US diplomat teamed up with the dispossessed heir to the throne of Tripoli to challenge the heir's usurper brother.

There is lots more to read in the interview over atEmpire.

Have any of you read Blood Meridian? No Country for Old Men was a brilliant movie and The Road was a great book, so I imagine Blood Meridian is a cracking read and seems to be another movie in the slow Hollywood build up of Westerns in recent years. I also like the sound of the mysterious Holden being viewed by some as not quite human (a bit like Anton Chigurh played by Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men). Who could you see playing the monstrous and hairless Judge Holden?
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Body of Lies, 2008 - Movie Review

Director: Ridley Scott
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, Mark Strong
Running Time: 128 minutes
Score: 4 / 10

This review by Eric Lavelle of Ion Cinema.

The size of a country’s circle of friends is ultimately decided by, how well one plays with others. With the kind of historical blemishes and failed foreign policy track record that the U.S have, the notion of courtyard bully rings especially true. Ridley Scott proposes that the CIA has multiple agendas on the war on terror when lead by arrogant arm chair decision makers and, the incognito ground troops that are one blunder away from certain death. Stylistically speaking, Body of Lies contains Scott’s trademark visual treatment of geopolitical hotbed zones and advances the double cross, spy game narrative with a pacing that yields satisfactory results, but scribe William Monahan's simplified formula, bad guy and good guy facile arrangement is less striking and impressionable than say, a CIA agent stationed in the Middle East film like Syriana - where the lead character and story arch is much more complex, not so black and white and richer in narrative design.

Scott avoids getting knee deep in political jargon by placing emphasis on the not-so-chummy relationship between well-defined characters toplined by Leonardo DiCaprio and Scott-regular with a couple of belt-sizes more in Russell Crowe. The distinctive differences is that the field worker with idealist motivations places more value on other folks in civilian clothes than perhaps the realists who see human life as simple ponds in a larger chess match. Unfortunately, the tension between these two characters is advertised throughout, the in-house disagreements over strategy are as clumsy as the nonchalant subplot inclusion of romantic proposal between a nurse and DiCaprio’s fluent Arab-speaking American character that has an appreciation for a culture and a people who clearly do not share the same sentiment in return. The reasons why DiCaprio’s Roger Ferris is so bent on doing one good deed after another remains aloof -- and the dreamy certainly adds no value to this plight, however, the main interest lies in the core story element retained from David Ignatius’ novel where mimicking the actions of a terrorist whose expertise lies in bombs and loss of human lives.

Actor Mark Strong, a spitting image of Andy Garcia, is perhaps the only character that delivers the goods. A high-ranking Jordanian intelligence player who seems to understand the bigger picture for his nation’s politics sets up a personal agenda in accordance to a strong set of principles, unfortunately, Body of Lies never cares to establish why the film’s protagonist belongs in a headspace where he feels he owes his life to people and a culture clearly detached from his own. Fans of the action sequences and technical work found in Scott’s Black Hawk Down will find more of the same high octane, but in smaller doses and will appreciate moments where bone cartilage acts as shrapnel, but will find minor issues of the heart and accompanying tetanus shots less appealing in the geopolitical scheme of things. Clearly, this is far from being the weakest of the recent wave of spy games where Americans overstep their limits in the Middle East.
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Posters - Synecdoche New York, The Changeling, City of Ember, Body of Lies, The Pleasure of Being Robbed

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Body of Lies - New Trailer

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Body of Lies - Trailer

After Terminator Salvation hit yesterday another trailer mooted to be on before The Dark Knight has surfaced. The new Ridley Scott movie, Body of Lies has hit the interweb. It looks pretty good. Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe who both look sufficiently different to their normal Hollywood looks. It's set in the Middle East and follows a former journalist being hired by the CIA to track down an Al Qaeda leader in Jordan. Now I've been to Jordan and had a great time. Petra is amazing. That's nothing to do with the movie, but I just wanted to tell you.

Body of Lies is due out on 10th October.

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Trailers with The Dark Knight

Comingsoon.net have confirmation on what trailers will be playing before The Dark Knight when it is released on 18th July. I'm assuming this is just for the USA, but I really hope it applies to the UK and elsewhere. Here's what Comingsoon have to say:

What you can expect are the first trailers for Warner Bros.' Terminator Salvation (May 22, 2009), which of course also stars Christian Bale, Zack Snyder's graphic novel adaptation Watchmen (Mar. 6, 2009), and the Ridley Scott-directed thriller Body of Lies (Oct. 10), with Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe.