Some 35 years after Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s first-ever graphic novel Violent Cases was published, Scary Monster, Lakesville Productions and Foton.Pictures have unveiled that development on a feature adaptation is now underway, with Oscar-winning actor Ben Kingsley attached to play the lead. The film is being led by the creative team behind the BAFTA-nominated The Girl With All The Gifts, including writer Mike Carey, director Colm McCarthy and producer Camille Gatin.
Violent Cases was created by Neil Gaiman (Good Omens, The Sandman, Coraline, Lucifer, American Gods, Doctor Who) and Dave McKean (Luna, Mirror Mask). The graphic novel’s original publisher Mike Lake reached out to Gaiman about turning it into a feature film. Lake suggested writer Carey, who had previously written Lucifer and many other books in the Sandman universe.
Violent Cases is a journey into the mind of Gaiman, as a famous author recounts fragmented childhood memories and visits to an osteopath who once worked for Al Capone, weaving a dark and twisting tale about stories, our memory, violence and the ways we can’t escape our past.
“I’m delighted to be working with this fantastic team on Violent Cases, which for me is about the power and importance of storytelling, about how we negotiate the shadows cast by the father figures in our lives and above all about the right of our inner child to be heard,” said Kingsley.
Directed by McCarthy (The Girl With All The Gifts, The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself, Peaky Blinders), the film will be produced by Lakesville Productions’ Edmund Kingsley, Scary Monster’s Gatin and McCarthy and Foton.Pictures’ Carlos Enrique Cuscó and Ari Taboada.
“Violent Cases is a wild, hallucinatory, yet thought-provoking and emotional comic. It’s so exciting to build a film from this incredible, genre-defining work,” said McCarthy, currently in post-production on Lionsgate and Temple Hill’s The Bagman, starring Sam Claflin and Antonia Thomas.
“As an aspiring writer back in the late 80s reading Violent Cases was a revelation and a joy for me,” added Carey. “Its darkness and playfulness defined a new approach to storytelling. Thirty-five years on, it’s still unique, and bringing it across into a new medium feels like discovering it again for the first time. Neil Gaiman redefined serialized comics with The Sandman, but Violent Cases was his and Dave McKean’s early masterpiece. It’s thrilling to be introducing it to a new audience, and taking its visual lyricism into a new medium.”
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