Deadline is exclusively reporting that Ridley Scott is teaming up with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck to direct Eric Jager’s 2004 non-fiction bestseller The Last Duel: A True Story of Trial by Combat in Medieval France.
Damon and Affleck are collaborating on the script with writer/director Nicole Holofcener, who is best known for the 1996 indie rom-com, Walking and Talking.
This would mark the first time the boys have teamed up to write something since they won the Oscar for the very-much altered Good Will Hunting screenplay.
The two will also star in the film, which would be the first time they have appeared on screen together since that 1997 hit. Unless you count Kevin Smith movies and I see no reason to do so.
The Last Duel is a tale of chivalry and revenge set in the 14th Century.
From the official Amazon description:
When Jean de Carrouges, a Norman knight, returns from combat in Scotland to find his wife, Marguerite, accusing Jacques LeGris, her husband’s old friend and fellow courtier, of brutally raping her, the knight takes his cause before the teenage King Charles VI. Amid LeGris’s vociferous claims of innocence and doubts about the now pregnant Marguerite’s charges (and about the paternity of her child), the deadlocked court decrees a “trial by combat” that leaves her fate, too, in the balance. For if her husband and champion loses the duel, she will be put to death as a false accuser.
According to the Deadline description, LeGris is Carrogues’ squire, which would further complicate the matter as to which actor gets which part.
For a decade, Affleck was Matt’s footman but now, after Affleck won an Oscar and fronted several huge movies including Gone Girl and the DCEU debacles, their respective power-levels are not so easy to assess.
Affleck has since been dropped as Batman and forgotten as a director after the disastrous Live By Night, so it looks like he will play the cad.
What Else Do We Know?
Not much was happening on the European mainland during the late 14th Century — the book takes place in 1386 — unless you count the Battle of Aljubarrota, where forces commanded by King John I of Portugal and his general Nuno Álvares Pereira, with the support of the English, opposed the army of King John I of Castile with its Aragonese, Italian and French allies at São Jorge, between the towns of Leiria and Alcobaça, in central Portugal.
The result was a decisive victory for the Portuguese, ruling out Castilian ambitions to the Portuguese throne and assuring John as King of Portugal.
Maybe they will move the timeline or make up some Crusader shit so they can talk about the poor oppressed Moslems. This is exactly what will happen.
