Joe Carnahan Interested In Directing Preacher
By Russ Fischer/June 8, 2010 12:11 am EST
A-Team director Joe Carnahan is doing the press rounds, as his film opens this week, and naturally the subject of past project developments and hopes for the future have both come up. The attention-getting thing is that Carnahan has expressed a desire to take over the film based on Vertigo’s Preacher comic book series, to which Sam Mendes was briefly attached before he sided with James Bond.SuperheroHype talked to Carnahan, who says of Preacher,
When he talks about ‘another comic book adaptation’ he’s referring in part to work on Taskmaster, a film based on a character that first appeared as a villain in The Avengers. (The character’s cover debut had him looking like someone put Moon Knight and the Hobgoblin in a blender.) Taskmaster is a guy who, essentially, can duplicate any action he sees. After a villainous career, he was pressed into service training heroes. (Read more history here.)
Of that film, Carnahan says,
Taskmaster was something we talked about, and I haven’t discussed it with [A-Team producer Alex Young] for ages, but I would love to get back in. I love the idea of a guy with photographic reflexes, he can see something and repeat it, I thought that was such a cool idea…I think it might be one of those Marvel characters you really need to reimagine because he’s got the whole skull and cape—it’s a bit grandiose I think—but it would certainly be a cool thing.
Regardless, I’d so much rather see Carnahan able to make more movies like Narc. (Admittedly, that might not be his interest.) That was a hell of a film, great work from Jason Patric and Ray Liotta, and the eight years since seems like a long time, especially with Smokin’ Aces as his only other finished feature in the interim. Promising projects like Killing Pablo and White Jazz repeatedly stalled out, which may make broader stuff like The A-Team seem like a good idea.
Granted, Preacher could be the bridge between the impulses of Narc and The A-Team, but I still have serious doubts that any adaptation would really hold together. I’d be happy to see Carnahan do it, if he could make it happen with the right tone. He doesn’t have the clout that Mendes does, and I’d guess that even Mendes would have run into problems making a proper version of Preacher.
