EXCLUSIVE: Here’s a very cool project bubbling at this year’s Cannes market.
We can reveal that Jacob Elordi and Lily-Rose Depp, two of the industry’s buzziest young names, are set to star in Outer Dark, a film based on iconic author Cormac McCarthy’s (No Country For Old Men) dark 1968 novel.
The “dark fairytale”, which is being lined up to shoot in 2026, will mark the English-language debut of Oscar-winning Son Of Saul filmmaker Laszlo Nemes.
Outer Dark is set in Appalachia during the Great Depression and tells of a young woman who bears her brother’s baby. The brother leaves the nameless infant in the woods to die, but tells his sister that the newborn died of natural causes and had to be buried. The sister discovers this lie and sets out to find the baby for herself. But as both brother and sister separately move through the countryside, three terrifying strangers are on their tails, wreaking death and destruction wherever they appear.
Nemes wrote the screenplay with Clara Royer, while Mike Goodridge of London-based Good Chaos is producing alongside Nemes after securing the book to screen rights; executive producers are Ilene Feldman, Ori Eisen of Original Films and Nicolas Gonda.
Goodridge, the Triangle Of Sadness co-producer who has Left-Handed Girl playing at this year’s festival, is among the team on the ground in Cannes in early talks with potential partners for the project. It’s not formally on sale here but there are likely to be plenty of suitors to finance or get behind it.
We understand the actors really sparked to the material and both are coming off big successes. It’s fitting stuff for both: Depp is coming off Oscar-nominated box office hit Nosferatu, another dark fairytale, while Euphoria and Priscilla star Elordi is coming off excellent notices for The Narrow Road To The Deep North and will next be seen as the creature in Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein, as Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights and in Ridley Scott’s Dog Stars, which is in production.
Laszlo Nemes said: “Since reading Outer Dark the first time, it has been my dream to make it into a film, and to find the appropriate cinematic language that would do justice to Cormac McCarthy’s evocative and cosmological work. Joined by two magnetic actors, I now feel it’s possible. The extraordinary source material is a profound inspiration to build a unique world that vibrates with life and death at the same time. An exciting road-movie, a terrible and beautiful journey into the labyrinth of the human soul – this is the ambition I have for Outer Dark.”
Nemes recently completed his third film Orphan (also produced by Goodridge) which is scheduled to premiere at a festival later this year before its October 23 release in Hungary. He will next shoot Moulin, a French-language epic about WWII resistance fighter Jean Moulin which is being sold at the Cannes market by 193. Gilles Lellouche and Lars Eidinger are starring for producer Alain Goldman.
Alongside Orphan, Goodridge is also in post-production on Edward Berger’s next film, The Ballad Of A Small Player, starring Colin Farrell and Tilda Swinton.
Cormac McCarthy’s lauded novels adapted for the screen include Oscar winner No Country For Old Men and Viggo Mortensen starrer The Road.
Elordi is repped by Gersh and Goodman, Genow. Depp is repped by CAA, Markham, Froggatt & Irwin, Agence Adequat, and Lichter, Grossman. Nemes is represented by CAA and Ilene Feldman Management.
