Park Chan-wook will direct S. Craig Zahler's 'The Brigands of Rattlecreek'; Amazon Studios will distribute
Amazon knows what's good for them.
Interesting fact, in Park Chan-wook’s accomplished career, the South Korean auteur has directed just two films that were written by someone other than Mr. Chan-wook. Those joint collaborations included Wentworth Miller’s familial fever-dream Stoker, starring Mia Wasikowska and Nicole Kidman, and AMC/BBCs recent adaptation of Jean Le Carre’s espionage series, The Little Drummer Girl.
The Brigands of Rattlecreek will mark Park Chan-wook's third directorial collaboration, this time with award-winning novelist and visionary filmmaker S. Craig Zahler. Yep, that's the same guy who wrote and directed 2015's ultraviolent western horror Bone Tomahawk and Vince Vaughn's bone-crunching prison drama, Brawl on Cell Block 99. Incidentally, both are now streaming on Amazon Prime!
Collider first broke the news reporting that none other than Matthew McConaughey is being courted to star in what's billed as an “ultraviolent western" that follows a sheriff and a doctor who seek revenge against a group of bandits who use the cover of a torrential thunderstorm to rob and terrorize the occupants of a small town. Though no deal has been closed, Amazon has reportedly pegged McConaughey to play the doctor opposite another A-List actor to play the sheriff. Paging Kurt Russell, again.
Zahler's previously titled The Brigands of Rattleborg was written in 2004 and topped 2006’s The Black List, an annual survey of the "most liked" motion picture screenplays not yet produced. It was six years later when Park Chan-wook boarded the project but for various reasons, “languished” in development likely “due to its ultra-violent” according to Collider. Now, yet another six years later, Amazon has picked up distribution rights to Chan-wook’s second Amazon distributed film next to The Handmaiden.
At this point, we'll keep our fingers crossed Rattlecreek moves from in development to pre-production at a swift pace. In the meantime, fans of S. Craig Zahler's can catch his latest - Dragged Across Concrete - set for limited release on March 22.
