How’s this for two grisly, blood-soaked tastes that taste great together: After years of threats, Oldboy director Park Chan-wook and Bone Tomahawk writer/director S. Craig Zahler are finally moving forward on a collaborative project, an “ultraviolent Western” titled The Brigands Of Rattlecreek. Per Collider, the film—which Park has been trying to get made for something like seven years—has been quietly picked up by Amazon, which is apparently hoping to lure Matthew McConaughey in to star.
The premise of Rattlecreek sees Zahler—fresh off Dragged Across Concrete and Brawl In Cell Block 99—get back to his violently old-timey roots, with a small frontier town attempting to fend off a crew of murderous criminals using the cover of a thunderstorm to take them for all they’ve got. (If he signs on, McConaughey would play the heroic town doctor, who teams up with the sheriff to fight the villains off in what’s been suggested to be an absurdly gory fashion.) Zahler wrote the script way back in 2005—long before he garnered national attention with that other bloody Western that became his directorial debut—but despite being placed on the Black List, it never managed to get made.
Park, meanwhile, has proven himself comfortable in genres ranging from crime flicks to vampire movies to period dramas—as long as someone in there is out for some kind of violent revenge. Rattlecreek would be his second English-language feature, after 2013's serial killer/family drama Stoker.