When Nick Cave isn’t dropping new Grinderman records, scoring films, writing novels, or erecting gold statues of himself, he likes to dabble in screenwriting. Most notably, Cave wrote the fantastic John Hillcoat-directed film The Proposition and a totally insane sequel to Gladiator, in which Russell Crowe’s “Maximus meddles with Roman gods in the afterlife, is reincarnated, defends early Christians, reunites with his son, and ultimately lives forever – leading tanks in the second world war and even mucking around in the modern-day Pentagon.”
Now Cave is teaming up with Hillcoat again (though he did write the soundtrack to Hillcoat’s new film The Road): “I’ve written another film script for John Hillcoat for a new movie,” Cave told Exclaim’s Vish Khanna. “It’s from a book called The Wettest Country in the World and it’s set in the depression. It’s about… well, it’s a new film and he’s trying to get that together.”
And sure enough, Variety confirms (via Movieweb) that Red Wagon and Columbia Pictures are backing Hillcoat’s project, which is based on Matt Bondurant’s novel about Depression-era bootlegging.