John Hillcoat is the director of The Road, which has had a publicly difficult path from page to screen. But that hasn’t stopped him from lining up a few potential follow-ups. We’ve talked about these more than once over the last months, but now that Hillcoat is doing domestic publicity for The Road a few more details are starting to trickle out. After the break, we’ve got positive news on casting for his adaptation of The Wettest County in the World, and his plans for Nick Cave’s recent novel The Death of Bunny Munro.

AtomicPopcorn spoke briefly with Hillcoat, who confirmed previous word that Shia LaBeouf and Ryan Gosling are interested in his Wettest County adaptation.

He describes the film as “West Virginia, moonshine, backwoods, and Prohibition. Nick Cave has written the script and we’ve got a phenomenal cast. Hopefully, but — it’s really tough out there.” Speaking about the attached cast, he says “Ryan Gosling and Shia LaBeouf. But yeah, I shouldn’t really talk about it cause it’s in the middle of all sorts of stuff.” In other words, let’s see how The Road does at the end of the month?

I really hope this happens. Hillcoat, Cave and Gosling would make a hell of a team. And perhaps Hillcoat will be the one to turn LaBeouf into the actor it once looked like he was poised to become. Somebody’s got to kill his ‘nononoNoNO!’ tendencies just like Soderbergh once whipped the ‘head down, eyes up’ acting style out of George Clooney. Hillcoat could be the guy.

Meanwhile, in addition to a possible slate of other projects, there’s a brewing adaptation of The Death of Bunny Munro, Nick Cave’s recent novel about the road trip undertaken by a lecherous door to door salesman and his son. The director says that one is destined for television. “We’re going to try and wake up the BBC and, or, actually Channel 4. We’re trying to say to British television,”look at HBO, I mean what the hell are you doing?”

Note: Hillcoat specified that one thing not on his plate is a remake of the 1973 French heist/romance picture La bonne année. But we knew that — the film is potentially the work of his collaborator Joe Penhall, screenwriter on The Road, and an article about future projects for both Hillcoat and Penhall was widely misread as saying that Hillcoat was part of that project.