Red Riding - the movie

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Welcome to another edition of Yet Another Ridley Scott Project.

Today's episode: Red Riding.

The rights to Channel 4's three part drama series, based on a quartet of novels by David Peace (who also wrote The Damned United) have been picked up by Columbia, with Scott Free lined up as the production company.

Scott seemingly is in line to direct, rather than just produce, and the project would reunite him with screenwriter Steve Zaillian, following their collaborations on Hannibal and American Gangster.

Four novels and five hours' worth of miniseries is obviously going to result in an extremely compressed movie-length narrative, so we're intrigued to see how this pans out. On the surface there might be comparisons with this year's State of Play: 6 hours of BBC drama truncated into two hours of Hollywood, which quite impressively survived the transformation.

But Red Riding features separate stories, linked thematically (disappearances and murders of young girls; police corruption) and by some recurring characters. One narrative from all those threads is a tall order indeed. Are we looking at a trilogy? Only one of the novels and not all of them?

Also as with State of Play, the action will be relocated Stateside, which will further distance the film from the real-life cases that the novels and the series are based on (including that of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper).

[Ferox13]

Mini-Series was interesting but uneven.