Columbia sermons Sam Mendes on ‘Preacher’

Kevin Smith once said the series was “more fun than going to the movies”, and finally after a decade of development deals going nowhere, false starts, and even a proposed television series, it looks like Columbia Pictures are serious about Preacher tapping Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes to helm the graphic novel to big-screen project. Variety reports that Original Film’s Neal Moritz is producing with Kickstart Prods.’ Jason Netter, Ken Levin and Ori Marmur are exec-producing.

The 75 graphic novel series that ran from between 95 to 2000 should be fairly challenging to adapt to the big screen since it borrows from the supernatural world and more blue-screen technology than what Mendes might have been used to with his previous films which include: a marriage dramedy, a marriage drama, film noir and war film genre.

Mendes who has just completed This Must Be the Place for Focus Features for an eventual 2009 release and we should be finally catching his documentary on Rufus Wainwright fairly soon as well.   

Wikipedia gives a fairly detailed breakdown of what writer Garth Ennis and artist Steve Dillon conceived:… this tells the story of Jesse Custer, a down-and-out preacher in the small Texas town of Annville. Custer was accidentally possessed by the supernatural creature named Genesis in an incident which killed his entire congregation and flattened his church. Genesis, the product of the unauthorized, unnatural coupling of an angel and a demon, is an infant with no sense of individual will. However, as it is composed of both pure goodness and pure evil, it might have enough power to rival that of God himself. In other words, Jesse Custer, bonded to Genesis, may have become the most powerful being in the whole of living existence. Custer, driven by a strong sense of right and wrong, goes on a journey across the United States attempting to (literally) find God, who abandoned Heaven the moment Genesis was born. He also begins to discover the truth about his new powers, which allow him to command the obedience of those who hear his words. He is joined by his old girlfriend Tulip O’Hare, as well as a hard-drinking Irish vampire named Cassidy.