A Single Shot to the Arm for David Jacobson with Fassbender Onboard

I’ll always wonder how much of an impact a negative box office result can have on a burgeoning career of an indie filmmaker. Profit margins is obviously not a tool to evaluate talent, and while we have ample proof of what a breakout hit can do, I’m guessing that bad B.O can surely put a hamper on future projects. David Jacobson will surely leave a larger imprint than he did with Down in the Valley, with the project he’ll be shooting in the new year.

Screen Daily reports that Jacobson will be working with the not too shabby foursome of Michael Fassbender, Forest Whitaker, William H. Macy and Thomas Haden Church this January on A Single Shot. Being packaged and sold at the AFM by HanWay Films, the thriller (which will shoot in the minus weather on tough, Canadian turf) is based on a screenplay written by Matthew F Jones who adapted from his own novel. Unanimous Pictures’ Chris Coen is producing and so is Brad Arseneau. Kevin Hicks will serve as executive producer for Northern United Film and Media.

If you want to be kept in the dark on the project don’t read the following book description, but if you want to know what kind of stylistic elements Jacobson can bring to the table, please check out his work on Dahmer (2000) after the jump.

This depicts the seven-day ordeal of a backwoods poacher who accidentally shoots a runaway girl. Set in an unnamed, seedy, mountain town, the novel opens as reclusive John Moon, whose wife and young son have recently left, hunts a buck into a canyon in the state preserve adjacent to his trailer home (which sits on farmland repossessed from his family by the bank some years before). There he fires a shot into a thicket, killing not the buck but teenage Ingrid Banes, who is hiding out with a cache of $100,000. In a panic, Moon stashes the body and takes the cash, hoping to facilitate a reconciliation with his wife, only to find it’s the property of Banes’s sadistic boyfriend, Waylon, and his psychopathic partner, “the Hen,” who’s linked to an unsolved local torture/murder case. Moon’s hardscrabble world then begins to implode: Banes’s body resurfaces, and resurfaces; overwhelmed with guilt, Moon decides to give her a proper burial, as Waylon and the Hen close in. With great economy, surprising pathos and a keen sense of the grotesque, Jones weaves this story toward a shocking showdown in the forest.