Bone Tomahawk and Dragged Across Concrete writer-director S Craig Zahler has a new film in the works. The Bookie & The Bruiser will star Vince Vaughn and Adrien Brody.
Ever since he made his eye-catching debut with 2015’s horror western Bone Tomahawk, S Craig Zahler has established himself as a specialist of tense, gritty films about tough men backed into even tougher situations.
Zahler’s latest project, The Bookie & The Bruiser, sounds similarly uncompromising. A period piece set in late 50s New York, it’s about two World War II veterans, one Jewish, one Italian, who team up to create an “illicit gambling operation”. Their new enterprise soon gets them in trouble with Irish gangsters and the Mafia.
According to Variety, Zahler has signed up his regular collaborator Vince Vaughn, who starred in Brawl In Cell Block 99 and Dragged Across Concrete (pictured above), to appear in this latest project. Given his stature, it’s likely he’ll play the Bruiser of the title – “an oversized Italian-American tough named Boscolo from the Lower East Side.”
Vaughn will be joined by Adrien Brody in the other title role – “a pensive, Jewish fellow named Rivner” who becomes a bookmaker.
Filming on The Bookie & The Bruiser is reportedly set to begin this autumn.
Production company Anton is working with Zahler on the film, and hopes to find distribution for it at the Cannes Film Festival later this month. The CEO of Anton, Sébastien Raybaud, describes The Bookie & The Bruiser as an “action-packed tale of a searing conflict between the Irish-American and Italian Mafias in New York.”
Anton is also financing Fuze, the upcoming thriller from Hell Or High Water director David Mackenzie. That one’s set to star the reliably watchable Aaron Taylor-Johnson and is due to begin filming in June.
When he isn’t writing and directing movies, Zahler is also a prolific novelist, cartoonist and musician – the latter taking in a death metal band called Realmbuilder and a synth project called Binary Reptile.
More on The Bookie & The Bruiser as we get it.
