When it was announced that Ridley Scott would be directing a new Blade Runner movie, it came with comments by Alcon Entertainment producer Andrew Kosove who said that particular project likely won't be able to get going until at least 2013. With Prometheus coming out this summer, that means Scott has a hole in his schedule that needs to be filmed. But which project will it be? Before working on the Alien prequel, Scott added a ton of projects to his upcoming slate, including the Monopoly movie, The Kind One, a Gucci biopic, and a Gertrude Bell biopic. If new reports are correct, however, it won't be any of those.
Ridley Scott is now in talks to direct The Counselor, based on a script written by Cormac McCarthy. Deadline says that the film will be the director's next project once work has been completed on Prometheus. McCarthy wrote the script on spec in December and it was sold to producers Nick Wechsler and Steve and Paula Mae Schwartz, who were also behind the adaptation of McCarthy's The Road. The author has also seen No Country For Old Men and All The Pretty Horses be adapted into features. Scott has already had talks with McCarthy directly and the website says that things are looking like a thumbs up.
The story follows a lawyer who tries to play on the wild side by getting involved with the drug business. When he gets sucked in too deep, though, he must fight and claw his way back out. Said Steve Schwartz about the script, "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. This may be one of McCarthy’s most disturbing and powerful works."
