We’re continually gobsmacked at the rate stories regarding offers and shortlists are coming in — predominantly because many of them eventuate to little — but, nevertheless, it’s now being reported that Oscar-winning scribe William Monahan and Australian helmer David Michôd are currently topping a shortlist to helm an upcoming adaptation of Ken Bruen‘s Irish-American cop-drama “Once Were Cops.”
Both directors have only recently made their own directorial debuts; each film seemingly vindicating their helmers candidacy for this role with Monahan’s upcoming crime-romance “London Boulevard” starring Colin Farrell and Keira Knightley and Michôd’s sprawling Australian crime-family-drama “Animal Kingdom,” which took Sundance by storm.
The story follows an unbalanced member of Ireland’s police force who coerces his way to join the New York Police Department as part of an exchange program, taking his brand of havoc to this side of the Atlantic. The potential adaptation, however, is noted to be relocating the story’s setting to Boston where the protagonist’s Irish heritage would be very fitting.
Monahan also has a strong connection to the city of Boston as a Massachusetts native himself and has set two of his scripts — Martin Scorsese‘s “The Departed” and Martin Campbell‘s “Edge Of Darkness” — in his hometown. Here’s a full synopsis of the novel courtesy of Amazon.
In this stripped-down dark thrill ride from Edgar-finalist Bruen (The Guards), a psychotic Irish cop, Matthew Patrick O’Shea (everybody called me Shea), blackmails his way into a green card and a police exchange program that takes him from Galway to New York City for a one-year stint with the NYPD. Partnered with the brutal Kurt Kebar Browski (he looked like a pit bull in uniform), the clever sociopath, who has a hidden predilection for serial rape and strangulation, brazenly advances his ambitions despite intense attention from Internal Affairs and a mobster named Morronni.
The project is being produced by Steven Sawalich (“Music Within“) and Gil Adler (“Superman Returns”) with a script by David Logan. No word yet on a time frame which the project looks to get rolling, but as Monahan recently signed on to write and direct an adaptation of “Becket,” scheduling may become an issue and force him out of the running.
