Filming the Unfilmable: Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Blood Meridian’

After many months of reading (and coming across a litany of words I’ve never heard of), I’ve finally finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. It is, without a doubt in my mind, of of the greatest literary achievements of the past century. It easily belongs alongside the greatest works of Faulkner, Hemingway and Morrison, and is one of the most lucid accounts of the death of the American West.

McCarthy is well-known for his literary style, eschewing quotation marks and filling run-on sentences with verbose accounts of minutiae. Blood Meridian ups the ante by doing away with any semblance of a plot and enters the Melville and Faulkner-esque territory of experiential train of thought, accounting the travails of the murderous Glanton Gang as they terrorize the borderlands of the American Southwest and Mexico.

Glanton and his band of murderers purge the land with no mercy or remorse.

The book is filled with such gorgeously terrifying imagery, and is blessed with the monstrous white whale that is McCarthy’s greatest of all creations, the macabre god of destruction Judge Holden. With all this abound and beautifully rendered in the most languid and lyrical of language, it becomes a herculean task for a filmmaker to not imagine the story on the big screen. But because of its nontraditional structuring, span, and chronology, Blood Meridian is considered among the many ‘unfilmable’ novels. My heart is crushed because I read that Todd Field of Little Children fame is slated to write and direct an adaptation. I like Todd Field, and I wish him well. But for purely selfish reasons - mainly that I love Westerns and my heart cries for material like this - I want to someday be able to take a crack at this book. I know I can do it.

EDIT: Word is now that James Franco has been handed the directorial duties for Blood Meridian.

But I truly believe that the book is adaptable, and for that matter I think there isn’t a book out there that can’t be adapted. The idea that a book can be deemed as ‘unfilmable’ is, to me, a true cop-out, a sentiment that is reinforced only by prescribed notions of what a film has to be. The minute anyone declares a story as ‘unfilmable,’ this should be a rallying call for filmmakers to very well make it happen.

Why? Because for a book to attain ‘unfilmable’ status, it means that the author pushed the boundaries of narrative, structure and characterization. They fundamentally changed the way we read a story, and this is an evolution of the artform. So if the storytelling has evolved, then so too must film storytelling evolve.

I’ve said it before - film, for all its desires to find the next hot new talent, is one of the most conservative industries on the planet. A large part of this is because of the exorbitant cost of making films. My fear is that a nontraditional narrative like Blood Meridian will be forced to become traditional because it has to appeal to the expectations of a large number of ticket buyers, which in turn will help recoup the investment needed to make the film a reality. We can’t really use the previous McCarthy adaptations as a barometer for Blood Meridian’s prognosis for success; No Country For Old Men and All the Pretty Horses are the most straightforward and linear of McCarthy’s works, and are completely different animals to Blood Meridian.

No, for Blood Meridian to be adapted correctly, in the narrative form that makes it so very special, it must be done by either going fully independent, or by having the unequivocal support of a major star willing to take a pay cut and help finance the film, or be made by a maverick producer who is willing to take the risk (luckily uber-producer Scott Rudin is behind the film), or it must be helmed by a director whose previous box-office success allows for them to make a passion project with little interference. Zack Snyder got this opportunity when, likely due to the success of his film 300, he got the chance to take on the legendary ‘unfilmable’ book Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. While I loved the film and I think Snyder did the book justice (minus the whole squid issue), he did what he and the likes of Robert Rodriguez have always done with their comic book adaptations, which is to replicate them frame for frame from the source material. This may very well be the safest way to do the adaptation, but it doesn’t push the evolution of cinema just as the books pushed conventional narrative.

Cinema has to evolve or else people will get bored, and the medium will become stale. Some might argue that this is already happening. There are filmmakers out there that are pushing the envelope, like Gaspar Noe with Enter the Void or Michael Winterbottom, who did an amazing job adapting another ‘unfilmable’ book in The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentlemen. Winterbottom’s film Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story is a classic example of filmmaking innovation when it comes to adapting an ‘unfilmable’ novel. Winterbottom embraces the essence, wit and fractured style of the novel and makes it his own, employing layers of meta narrative that ultimately pays 100% authenticity to the base novel. It is a tremendous achievement, and it is a truly under-appreciated film.

In the end, I want a crack at Blood Meridian, because I know in my heart I can do it. I see it in my head, I feel it pulsing through my arteries. I know how to lay it out, to make it happen. I may be sounding like an overconfident indie director but this is something that’s in my bones, like something I was destined to do. I can’t explain it. I will get my shot at it, I guarantee it. If Great Expectations and the works Shakespeare can be remade countless times, then I know I’ll get my chance at Blood Meridian, one way or another. I was told I was crazy when I said I wanted to adapt Dante’s Inferno - also thought largely ‘unfilmable’ - as an indie horror film in the form of Lilith. There are ways to do it, and the minute someone tells you it’s impossible to do something, that’s your first sign to make it happen.

So mark my words, dear reader. In due time we’ll be revisiting this writing and it will ring prophetic. I know this to be true.