[Updated] Until recently known as The Wettest County, John Hillcoat’s Lawless sees him return behind the camera for the first time since the BAFTA-nominated The Road, and he’s put together one of the best line-ups to look forward to in 2012.
Tom Hardy, Shia LaBeouf, Gary Oldman, Guy Pearce, Jessica Chastain, and Mia Wasikowska are all very much well-known and -loved faces, and Jason Clarke has been deservedly on the rise, along with the young Dane DeHaan, one of the leads in Chronicle.
Not to be confused with one of Terrence Malick’s many upcoming films, a few set photos from Hillcoat’s Lawless have surfaced already, but this is our first official look at the film with a scan from EW, via The Playlist – as it’s a scan, it’s a little grainy, but nonetheless awesome, and we can no doubt look forward to a hi-res version soon.
The film sees Hillcoat working once more with screenwriter Nick Cave (of the band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) after their critically-acclaimed The Proposition, with Cave adapting Matt Bondurant’s original 2008 novel, The Wettest County in the World.
“In 1928, a pair of thieves accost Bondurant’s real life great-uncle Forrest at his Franklin County, Va., restaurant. They’re after a large cache of bootlegging money and end up cutting Forrest’s throat. The story of his survival and his trek to a hospital 12 miles away has taken on mythical proportions by the time Sherwood Anderson arrives in Franklin County in 1934 to research a magazine piece on the area’s prolific moonshiners. Soon after Anderson’s arrival, two anonymous men appear at the same hospital, one with legs meticulously shattered from ankle to hip, the other one castrated, with the by-products of the deed deposited in a jar of moonshine. The arc of the story lies between the attack on Forrest and that on the two men.”
Lawless is set to debut in the US on 31st August, which sounds like such a good film to see out the summer with. As yet, the UK doesn’t have a release scheduled, but Momentum Pictures have picked up the rights, so hopefully we’ll be getting a concrete date soon. As usual with this great first image, you can click to enlarge. And with a bit of luck, we’ll have a hi-res version and more new images to bring you soon.
[Update: EW have now put out a clearer version of the image, which I’ve put above the original picture, in case you’d like to read the text down the right side of the scan from the magazine itself.]
