Lawless Director John Hillcoat Eyes A Science Fiction Film
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Australian director John Hillcoat’s latest film, the Prohibition-era crime drama Lawless, hits Blu-ray and DVD this week. Best known for his grim western The Proposition, and the post-apocalyptic adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Hillcoat wants to bring his bleak sensibilities to the realm of science fiction.
Talking about his upcoming projects with The Playlist, Hillcoat said, “I would love to go further into the future and do a sci-fi film.” While he doesn’t have a particular story in mind, either an original idea or an adaptation of an existing work, he had definite ideas on the type of narrative he’d like to tackle.
I love Alien and Blade Runner and 2001. I love the sci-fi movies where it’s from the point of view of humans in that situation…When it becomes too clever in its ideas, the cyber-punk high-tech thing, it becomes more about something else. I still like man’s relationship to all of that. Or it becomes a pure spectacle like a computer game. So I’m looking to get the right balance there.
This sounds like a great idea to me. Hillcoat’s films have a sparse, austere aesthetic, one that is an excellent fit for this sort of grim, idea-driven sci-fi. Within the wider genre, that might be my favorite subset, and I’ll see anything like this he wants to put out into the world.
If Hillcoat does wind up taking on a science fiction project, it likely won’t be for some time. In the wake of Lawless, he’s a rather busy man. Next up for him is the crime drama Triple Nine, scheduled to shoot later this year, and a proposed remake of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Circle Rouge.
