Away We Go Again – Focus Makes Pact with Mendes on a Possible Pair

Despite only being in theaters for the past two weeks and having Away We Go rake in just under a million at the BO, Focus Features is thinking long term with Sam Mendes (well at least till 2011) and are hoping to get the filmmaker to take on a pair of period piece projects. Mendes and Neal Street Prods have according to Variety, signed a two-year first-look deal that could see Mendes direct. Mendes has gone back in time (Road to Perdition and Revolutionary Road), but not this far back. 

Not “Miller’s” but Butcher’s Crossing is based on the 1960 revisionist Western novel by John Williams and is set in 1870s America, the pic focuses on a man who forsakes his Harvard education to move to the small Kansas town of Butcher’s Crossing. The New York Times Book Review called the novel “harsh and relentless yet muted in tone, Butcher’s Crossing paved the way for Cormac McCarthy. It was perhaps the first and best revisionist western.”

The book features a male protag in Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek “an original relation to nature,” drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher’s Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher’s Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher’s Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been.

Polsky Films’ Gabe and Alan Polsky would be producing with Neal Street Prods.

The other project that Focus wants to set Mendes on, is once again a genre that the helmer hasn’t touched before. Scripted by Andrew Davies (Brideshead Revisited), this is based on George Eliot (aka Marian Evans) novel about changing fortunes in a provincial English community in the early 1830s. Middlemarch would have “multiple plots with a large cast of characters, and in addition to its distinct though interlocking narratives it pursues a number of underlying themes, including the status of women, the nature of marriage, idealism and self-interest, religion and hypocrisy, political reform, and education.” For a fully elaborate exploration of the novel – visit the wiki page.