Joe Carnahan Adapting “Narc” For Television: The State of Filmmakers and TV

In a recent interview with /Film Joe Carnahan revealed details on the adaptation of his 2002 film Narc into a mini-series for Paramount.

I’m writing the outline of it right now. I mean, dude, it’s crazy. I came up with, what I thought, was a really cool way of kind of depicting that world right now, particularly Detroit. And Amy Powell, [Head of Television] at Paramount, God love her, really fell in love with it and said, “Listen, do you think we can do it?” And I said, “Yeah.” I mean it’s gonna mean some interesting things in terms of the feature and I don’t wanna give anything up yet, but it’s really exciting, man. It’s kind of the perfect television. It’s kind of limited, whether you do eight or 10 or what have you. It’s a really perfect format to kind of explore that world.

I wanna do something really cinematic and really filmic and keeping it the style… look I thought what Cary Fukunaga [and Nic Pizzolatto] did with True Detective was fucking phenomenal. It just had such a brilliant through line. Just a creative through line. And you knew that the origin was one single voice. That was fantastic. And I may do that on Narc. It’s like, that’s the thing, between directing maybe potentially eight to 10 of those hour long things over four or five months or whatever and busting my balls to a finance an indie? I’ll take the TV side. It’s much cooler. And the time, you can really let these things unfold, you know what I mean? Every moment’s not like a buzzer beater. It’s nice to let it kind of relax and just unfold naturally.

If you haven’t seen Narc, it was an effective psychological slow-burn police thriller featuring fierce performances from Jason Patric and Ray Liotta and marked a stellar entry into Joe Carnahan’s filmography, who continues to be one of the most underrated working directors in my book.

This particular instance of a film getting adapted to television serves a sort of microcosm for where the filmmaking industry and television industry are colliding together. This is just the most recent example of not only a film being adapted to television like Fargo, Bates Motel, About A Boy and Hannibal – it’s also the most recent example of a filmmaker heading to television for the creative freedom it’s offering.

Recently multiple filmmakers have made their way to television to tell their stories that studios wouldn’t fund. The most recent example was referenced by Carnahan in his interview, the HBO hit True Detective earlier this year had Cary Fukunaga take his razor-sharp tone to television for what worked as an 8 hour film. Todd Haynes saw his Mildred Pierce adaptation come to life as a mini-series on HBO. Steven Soderbergh took his wonderful Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra to HBO and will be directing 10 episodes of the Clive Owen-starring mini-series The Knick for Cinemax. In other words, in the current climate in Hollywood an Oscar-winning Director couldn’t get a low-budget Liberace biopic starring Michael Douglas and Matt Damon funded. And let’s not forget that this is almost a decade after Brokeback Mountain was released.

When you look at Carnahan’s troubled past with getting projects made in Hollywood, it seems there is no question as to why he’s so enthusiastic about going to television to tell his stories. In 2010 he released The A-Team, and since then he has had more projects get rejected than most directors even attempt to pitch in a lifetime. There was his 70s-styled, Hell’s Kitchen set Daredevil movie he pitched. There were his adaptations of James Ellroy’s White Jazz and comic-book properties Nemesis, Taskmaster and Preacher that never made it past hypotheticals. He had a Death Wish remake that got shut down, as well as a Frank Grillo-starring thriller Continue.

In that time only two films have gone to production, one of which was 2012’s remarkable Liam Neeson-starrer The Grey. The other project is Stretch starring Patrick Wilson and Chris Pine, which was set for release on March 21st this year only to get pulled from Universal’s calendar over indecision on how to market the film. This tells us the studios seem to be at such a helpless place that they can’t even figure out how to break even on a film that cost less than $5 million dollars. And let’s not forget that this film is also produced by low-budget wunderkind Jason Blum of Blumhouse pictures, who is notorious for stretching singles to doubles, triples or even home runs at the box office.

I hope that Universal can figure themselves out and that we will be able to see Stretch by the end of the year. For now though it appears Carnahan is not only looking to his next project, but to greener pastures with his Narc mini-series. While this comes at the cost of having less Carnahan films on the big screen, what it does mean is getting a potential 8-10 hour film of Narc from him which I would be very excited to see. Here’s hoping that the Narc mini-series will find similar success to True Detective, which has since allowed its helmer Cary Fukunaga to greenlight projects on an almost weekly basis. I’m excited to see Carnahan bring his talents to the mini-series format, but at the same time it says some troubling things on the climate in Hollywood.

Source: /Film