Tom Hardy Starring Alongside Shia LaBeouf In John Hillcoat’s ‘The Wettest County in the World’

24Frames have reported that Tom Hardy has joined Shia LaBeouf In John Hillcoat’s (The Road, The Proposition) revived prohibition crime drama ‘The Wettest County in the World.’ A few months back this film looked to have been scrapped due to financing problems – I’m stoked as a goat it’s back on! According to the article the film is set to start shooting Spring 2011.

Ryan Gosling, Scarlett Johansson, Paul Dano, Amy Adams and Michael Shannon were all previously attached to star, there’s no word on their status at this moment in time. The film is an adaptation of Matt Bondurant’s novel ‘The Wettest County in the World: A Novel Based on a True Story,’ and the screenplay is penned by frequent Hillcoat collaborator Nick Cave. Below is a brief synopsis of the book.

This family saga follows the Bondurants, bootlegging brothers runnin’ stills, runnin’ loads, and runnin’ from the law in Depression-era Virginia. The book is mainly narrated through the experience of the youngest Bondurant, Jack (in truth, a grandfather of the author), and his family’s moonshine enterprise supplies the action in a plot that evokes the culture of distilling and distributing white lightning. To optimistic Jack, bootlegging is both a bond to his older brothers, Forrest and Howard, and a means to make cash to impress a girl. Forrest, by contrast, is taciturn and suspicious: the world is violent, and he meets it on that ground. Tender of the stills and imbiber from same, burly Howard is always ready to take on the Bondurants’ enemies, corrupt law officers. Wending through this conflict in flash-forward mode is novelist Sherwood Anderson, who plumbs the Bondurant story a few years after the brothers’ climactic confrontation with the county sheriff. Descriptively gritty and emotionally resonant, novelist Bondurant dramatically projects the poverty and danger at the heart of the old-time bootlegging life.