Ridley Scott has been making films for over forty years, and while not every movie has been a winner, I'm always excited when the director kicks off a new project. Deadline has reported that Ridley Scott's next project may very well be THE LAST DUEL, a revenge story based on the novel by Eric Jager.
The script for THE LAST DUEL is almost done, and get this, it's been written by Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Nicole Holofcener, which marks the first collaboration on a script between Damon and Affleck since GOOD WILL HUNTING. I'm intrigued. The revenge story follows two best friends who will be played by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. "One goes to war and returns to discover the other has rapes the soldier’s wife. No one will believe the woman, and the soldier appeals to the king of France and says he wants to fight a duel to the death, and if the other guy wins, he is innocent. It becomes the last legally sanctioned duel in France," reads the logline from Deadline. This brings back memories of Scott's first film, THE DUELLISTS, which starred Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel as two dueling officers in the Napoleonic era. The Eric Jager novel has been held by 20th Century Fox for some time, but now that Disney controls Fox, they will have to see if the script fits the studio's template. Deadline also states that "every studio in town" is waiting to scoop the project up if Disney passes, and as it seems to be coming together quite quickly, Scott may even push back his MERLIN film at Disney to make THE LAST DUEL his priority.
A synopsis of "The Last Duel" via Amazon:
When Jean de Carrouges, a Norman knight, returns from combat in Scotland to find his wife, Marguerite, accusing Jacques LeGris, her husband’s old friend and fellow courtier, of brutally raping her, the knight takes his cause before the teenage King Charles VI. Amid LeGris’s vociferous claims of innocence and doubts about the now pregnant Marguerite’s charges (and about the paternity of her child), the deadlocked court decrees a “trial by combat” that leaves her fate, too, in the balance. For if her husband and champion loses the duel, she will be put to death as a false accuser.
Carrouges and LeGris, in full armor, eventually meet on a walled field in Paris before a massive crowd that includes the king and many nobles of the realm. A fierce fight on horseback and then on foot ensues during which both combatants suffer wounds—but only one fatal. The violent and tragic episode was notorious in its own time because of the nature of the alleged crime, the legal impasse it provoked, and the resulting trial by combat, an ancient but increasingly suspect institution that was thereafter abolished.
Ridley Scott has a number of projects in the works, including THE MERLIN SAGA, a sequel to GLADIATOR, an adaptation of Greg Rucka's "Queen & Country", as well as possible sequels in the ALIEN and BLADE RUNNER franchises.