August: Osage County producer Jean Doumanian has set up an adaptation of the Nic Pizzolatto novel Galveston. Janus Metz is set to direct and the star will be Matthias Schoenaerts, who has followed his breakthrough role in Bullhead starring in Rust And Bone and the Thomas Vinterberg-directed Far From The Madding Crowd. They are casting the female lead right now for a spring start. Pizzolatto wrote the script, Deadline said.

Pizzolatto is creator, writer, showrunner and exec producer on the critically lauded new HBO series True Detective with Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey. Galveston was his first novel. Roy “Big Country” Cady is diagnosed with a terminal illness the same day he discovers his loan-sharking bar-owning boss wants to kill him. He gets the better end of an ambush by the boss’s gun-toting cronies, but he takes two sisters he finds hiding in the apartment with him and makes a run for Galveston. That proves to be a bad call. The novel has been compared in tone to early Cormac McCarthy.

Metz directed Armadillo, the first docu to compete in the International Critics’ Week at Cannes and won the Grand Prize. He followed a platoon of Danish soldiers on a six-month tour of Afghanistan in 2009, capturing the horrors and growing cynicism of warfare that became a hot button release in Denmark, provoking a national debate over government policy and the rules of engagement. Doumanian and Patrick Daly are producing and London’s Embankment Films will handle international sales.