James Franco to Tackle Cormac McCarthy's 'Child of God' Next
Critically-acclaimed actor James Franco is steadily working his way off the screen and into the director’s chair with his newest project adapting a Cormac McCarthy novel. He spoke recently of the project at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Putting aside his earlier plans to adapt McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian, Franco is looking to move on to another one of McCarthy’s books, titled Child of God.
“We shot a 20-minute test of it that turned out pretty well,” the 33-year-old actor said, according to We Got This Covered. “We were gearing up to do the feature but that for various reasons is on hold, but we are going to make a movie based on his third book, Child of God.”
Get Our Latest News for FREE
The 1974 novel is a suspenseful thriller based on a historical murder case in Tennessee.
Lester Ballard, the main character, “is a murderer and necrophile, expelled from the human family and eventually living in underground caves, which he peoples with his trophies: giant stuffed animals won in carnival shooting galleries and the decomposing corpses of his several shot victims, male and female,” McCarthy’s website says.
“This is the child of God,” the description reads. “Despite its tracing of Lester’s process of alienation and loss of moral direction, the novel resists all effort on the part of community or reader to explain empirically either his crimes or his quasi-redemption. The novel insists that such explanations are specious a posteriori false comfort, and that Lester Ballard is finally, or potentially, everyman: ‘A child of God much like yourself perhaps.’”
Penned in a sympathetic light, the novel, much like how the film will be, has been known to disturb social norms and view of humans.
One reviewer, M. Cieso, wrote on Amazon, “If there is any moral to this story for me it is that any ‘child of God’ is capable of doing anything, that freedom of will does not constitute freedom from responsibility no matter what the setting of the individual.”
“This novella is not for everybody,” JMack, another reader shared. “Even while Lester Ballard is at his most depraved, the reader cannot help feeling some sense of connection. For the author to do this with such a main character speaks volumes for this work.”
If Franco follows through with plans to adapt this chilling tale into a movie, the film will be the fourth of McCarthy’s books to be put on the big screen.
Previously, All the Pretty Horses, The Road, and the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men were made into movies.
“No Country for Old Men,” which starred Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem, was the most successful of the three films, snagging Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Picture at the 2008 Oscars.
Whether or not Franco can emulate the success of the Coen brothers’ “No Country for Old Men” with “Child of God” is uncertain.
The “127 Hours” star has previously directed “Fool’s Gold,” “Good Time Max” and “The Broken Tower.”
Earlier this month, Franco was out promoting his new film “Sal” at the Venice Film Festival, which he also wrote and directed. The film about real-life actor Sal Mineo’s rise to fame, and details the final hours of the “Rebel Without a Cause” actor in his last moments.
Franco is also working on a documentary about his years as a cast member of “General Hospital."
