Out doing The A-Team rounds, director Joe Carnahan has revealed to Superherohype that he's got his eye on Vertigo comics' **Preacher. The project, a kind of modern-day Biblical Western based on Garth Ennis' awesome series, has been in development for a while, but the director's chair has been empty since Sam Mendes departed for Bond 23. Hey, he might come back yet.
"I'm really keen on Preacher," says Carnahan, "because I'm a big Garth Ennis fan. I love that series... all that crazy shit. I haven't seen a script, but we'll see..."
Preacher's 75 issues, roughly speaking, follow the Reverend Jesse Custer (who, possessed by the godlike offspring of an angel and a demon, has some rather special abilities), his ass-kicking girlfriend Tulip and their amoral vampire compadre Cassidy, on an odyssey trailing God, who has gone missing.
Carnahan particularly mentions wanting to tackle the subplot featuring the "Allfather" D'Aronique (favourite things: "mass murder and big pies") who leads the super-secret, super-powerful, totally evil Grail organization: keepers of Christ's bloodline in the form of a "special" inbred boy whose vocabulary consists solely of the word "humperdido". We don't know if John August's script already includes any of this. If not, maybe he should start scribbling, although whether any studio would have the balls to go with it is a definite issue.
Details aside, Preacher in its original form is very violent and very funny: rather a good fit for the man that made Smokin' Aces, we'd suggest. But if it comes to naught (John August may score the gig himself), Carnahan has another idea: Marvel's Taskmaster.
"I think it might be one of those Marvel characters you'd have to reimagine," he says. "He's got the whole skull and cape... it's a bit grandiose I think. But it could certainly be cool. He's so below the radar. He's even below where Blade was considered a B-tier Marvel character: even lesser-known. It would be a lot of fun to write..."
Carnahan's revisionist A-Team, starring Liam Neeson, Sharlto Copley, Rampage Jackson, Jessica Biel and Bradley Cooper is out on July 28th.**
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