Ben Kingsley is set to star in a feature film adaptation of “Violent Cases,” the first ever graphic novel from Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean.
The feature will be led by writer Mike Carey, director Colm McCarthy and producer Camille Gatin (collectively the creative team behind “The Girl With All the Gifts”) and produced by Scary Monster, Lakesville Productions and Foton.Pictures.
Carey has also worked on “Lucifer” and other books in the Sandman universe, which Gaiman also created.
“‘Violent Cases’ is a journey into the mind of Neil 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,” reads the logline.
Kingsley will play the osteopath.
Edmund Kingsley produces for Lakesville Productions, Camille Gatin and Colm McCarthy for Scary Monster and Carlos Enrique Cuscó and Ari Taboada for Foton.Pictures.
“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.
McCarthy said: “’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.”
Carey added: “As an aspiring writer back in the late 80s reading ‘Violent Case’s was a revelation and a joy for me. 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 serialised 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.”