John Michael McDonagh Adapting Percival Everett Novel ‘Assumption’

With his first two films — The Guard and Calvary — set and shot in Ireland, John Michael McDonagh will soon test the waters of his first director’s trip away from the Emerald Isle when War on Everyone world premieres in the Panorama section of next month’s Berlin Film Festival.

The film, a “jet-black action comedy,” was shot on location in Albuquerque and stars Alexander Skarsgard and Michael Pena as corrupt New Mexico cops out to blackmail every criminal they come across.

But it seems the director was so taken with the film’s setting that he’s already planning to return for a follow-up.

“I’m currently working on Assumption, my adaptation of the book by the great Percival Everett, about a black deputy sheriff in New Mexico,” the British filmmaker tells The Hollywood Reporter.

Assumption, Everett’s 2011 follow-up to I Am Not Sidney Poitier, is described as a “baffling triptych of murder mysteries” set in Plata, a fictional county in the northern part of New Mexico and a “blink-and-you-missed-it burg of shabby adobe dwellings and aging pickup trucks and trailers,” according to The New York Times‘ review.

While McDonagh didn’t offer a time frame for the project, he confirmed that it would be produced through his own Reprisal Films, whose first release, The Guard, grossed more than $20 million worldwide in 2011.

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