source : the age
If there’s a way to describe Tim Winton’s reaction to the news his 30-year-old book The Riders will be filmed starring Brad Pitt, it’s cautiously optimistic.
“I’ve been around so long I’m very unlikely to get excited about these things,” the famed West Australian novelist says.
“But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious.”
The novel has been published in numerous editions and translations since the 1990s.
It was revealed last week production company A24 had won a bidding war over the script adapting Winton’s 1994 Booker Prize-shortlisted novel.
It will be directed by Edward Berger (Conclave, All Quiet on the Western Front) with Ridley Scott among producers, with shooting starting across Europe in early 2026.
The uncanny story of an Australian man searching for his missing wife and child across Western Europe was written when Winton returned home after a period living in Ireland, France and Greece.
Winton tells WAtoday it was optioned for film within days of publication, so the quest to bring it to film has now taken three decades, with three directors previously named, and actors involved at times including Sam Worthington, Ronan Keating, Luke Hemsworth and Richard E. Grant.
He reflects that when he and his wife left Australia in their twenties for the period in question, they had in tow their first son who turned three on the day they left.
“This is a man who’s now 40 and has two kids in high school,” he says.
“So it’s been a long day, comrade.”
But he debunked industry gossip saying the novel’s nebulous ending was too challenging.
Brad Pitt in production on the movie ‘F1’, arriving in cinemas in June.Credit: AP
“The ambiguity of the ending was never the reason previous projects fell over, it was always business reasons – cast members not big enough to get a picture greenlit, or people running into financial arguments,” Winton says.
“No-one’s ever come to me asking for a tidy ending.”
Behind the scenes, screenwriter David Kajganich, known for horror works including AMC series The Terror, had been chasing the rights for years, “pestering” Winton’s longtime Hollywood agent, Jerry Kalajian, who is responsible for getting many Australian stories told to the world.
When the rights finally became available in 2018 Kajganich snapped them up.
“Dave is a terrific screenwriter and a trustworthy person,” the author says.
“Everyone tells you the movie industry is full of vipers and carnivores, and it has more than its fair share of narcissists and nitwits, but there are still a lot of decent people, and Dave strikes me as one of those.
“He got Ridley Scott interested straight away and they took it to Ed Berger, who needed to settle his business with Conclave [2024, starring Ralph Feinnes, Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow] but made it clear The Riders would be his next picture.
“A24 won [the bidding] over one of the streaming giants.
“And Mr Pitt is still able to open a picture, as they say … he can often make a bad movie worth bothering with and make a good movie a delight. Apparently he loves the screenplay.
“Obviously Ridley Scott has his own record as a producer, and the studio is riding high, so in industrial terms it looks pretty solid. Nothing’s ever guaranteed to go ahead, but in terms of a project’s chances of progressing you couldn’t ask for a more heavyweight set of elements.”
Regarding commentators’ fear of a potentially cringeworthy Pitt attempt at an Australian accent, he says they have figured this out by making lead character Scully an American expatriate who had been in Australia long-term before the events of the plot, allowing him to retain his native accent.
And Winton approves of the screenplay.
“People will see an ending that reflects the book as far as I can see,” he says.
“If everything was explained, it wouldn’t be a book by Tim Winton. The insatiable need for closure is something that might work in therapeutic terms but it’s not got much to do with art.
“The thing Dave’s always said was attractive is the essential, and implacable, mystery of the book and he would not dishonour or disrupt that.”
And will the novelist involve himself in the filming?
