Judging from the number of years it takes him to produce a film, Todd Field might never reach the output level of that of his mentor John Ford (40 titles), but he might be joining the ranks of the master filmmaker by embarking in the genre that Ford was all to familiar with. Field was reported to be adapting a Western-like project and lensing Cormac McCarthy‘s 1840’s set Blood Meridian, but instead is poised to transfer Boston Teran‘s 1910 set The Creed of Violence into screenplay format and then, according to his track record and Variety’s Michael Fleming, possibly direct. Universal Pictures wrote a big check to grab the pre-emptive rights to the project, and have set Field to write the screenplay.
The novel to be released in the Fall is “set against a backdrop of intrigue and corruption, The Creed of Violence is a saga about the scars of abandonment, the greed of war, and America’s history of foreign intervention for the sake of oil.”
Field only has two feature films under his belt, but both hav been book to film projects in the Best Picture nominated In the Bedroom (from a short story from Andre Dubus) and Little Children (Tom Perrotta).
Set in Mexico, 1910. At the Mexican-American border, the landscape pulses with the force of the upcoming revolution, an atmosphere rich in opportunity for a criminal such as Rawbone. His fortune arrives across the haze of the Sierra Blanca in the form of a truck loaded with weapons, an easy sell to those financing a bloodletting.
But Rawbone’s plan spins against him, and he soon finds himself in the hands of the Bureau of Investigation. He is offered a chance for immunity, but only if he agrees to proceed with his scheme to deliver the truck and its goods to the Mexican oil fields – all the while being under the command of agent John Lourdes. Unbeknownst to Rawbone, the agent happens to be the son he abandoned decades earlier, a truth only the agent knows. As they work to expose the criminal network at the core of the revolution, it is clear their journey into the tarred desert is a push toward a certain ruin, and the agent’s secret may determine their fates.
