Ben Kingsley is scheduled to appear in the film version of Violent Cases, the comic novel by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. The creative team behind The Girl With All the Gifts consists of writer Mike Carey, director Colm McCarthy, and producer Camille Gatin. Carey has already worked on adaptations of other books in Gaiman’s The Sandman world, so he is no stranger to the author’s imagination. Besides Edmund Kingsley, Camille Gatin and Colm McCarthy of Scary Monster, and Carlos Enrique Cuscó and Ari Taboada of Foton. Pictures will be produced for Lakeville Productions. The book’s tagline reads: “a voyage inside the mind of Neil Gaiman.” In the best-selling graphic novel, the protagonist, a famous novelist, recounts recollections from his youth and his trips to an osteopath who used to work for the notorious mobster Al Capone.
The film adaptation, which will star Kingsley as the osteopath, is being described as “a dark and twisty narrative about stories, human memory, violence, and the ways we can’t escape our past.” “I’m happy to be collaborating with this amazing team on Violent Cases,” Kingsley stated, “because the film is about the power and necessity of storytelling, about how we navigate the shadows cast by the father figures in our lives, and above all about the right of our inner child to be heard.”
Kingsley, who may be most remembered for playing Gandhi in 1982’s Gandhi or Itzhak Stern in Schindler’s List starring Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes, will appear in Netflix’s next feature The School for Good and Evil, which premieres on October 19. The Oscar-winning actor has a lengthy filmography that includes roles in films like Fifty Dead Men Walking, Hugo, and Shutter Island. To paraphrase one reviewer, “Violent Cases is a crazy, hallucinogenic, yet thought stimulating and emotional comedy. McCarthy said, “It is so wonderful to construct a picture from this amazing, genre-defining masterpiece.
It’s true that Violent Cases was the first graphic novel that Gaiman and McKean collaborated on, but it’s not the first to be turned into a movie. Even though the premiere of Netflix’s The Sandman was met with praise, many of the characters from Neil Gaiman’s comic books have already been featured in other series or even gotten their own show, such as Lucifer, starring Tom Ellis in the eponymous role. Since Gaiman is one of the most influential authors of the last four decades, it is not surprising that his works have been adapted for the screen so frequently.
“Reading Violent Cases was an epiphany and a pleasure for me as a young writer in the late ’80s. Carey remarked that the novel’s mix of gloom and humour marked a “new style to the narrative.” Even after 35 years, it still stands out, and translating it into new media is like finding it for the first time. The Sandman may have revolutionised serialised comics, but Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s Violent Cases was an early classic. Bringing it to a new audience and adapting its visual lyricism for a different media is quite exciting.