Wiley Cash is the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of A Land More Kind Than Home. A native of North Carolina, he has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He has held residency positions at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Southern New Hampshire University. He and his wife live in Wilmington, North Carolina.Here Cash dreamcasts an adaptation of his new novel, This Dark Road to Mercy:
This Dark Road to Mercy is about a washed-up minor league baseball player who kidnaps his two daughters from a foster home. Who would I cast in the movie? I'll do better than that; I'll tell you who I'd like to write the screenplay and direct it: Jeff Nichols. I'm a huge fan of his three films. The one I saw most recently was Mud, so, that being said, I'd cast Matthew McConaughey as the father, Wade Chesterfield, and I'd cast Michael Shannon to play Pruitt, the steriod-addled bounty hunter who's on the family's trail. For the oldest daughter I'd build a time machine and cast Tatum O'Neal at the same age she was when she starred in Paper Moon. But the bounty hunter isn't the only person looking for Wade and his three daughters. The girls have a court-appointed guardian named Brady Weller who's doing his best to find them. For that role I'd like to cast Ed Harris, a mercurial actor who seems just as capable of overt kindness as he is intense stoicism.Learn more about the book and author at Wiley Cash's website.
Writers Read: Wiley Cash (April 2012).
My Book, The Movie: A Land More Kind Than Home.
--Marshal Zeringue
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