Django Unchained star Christoph Waltz is putting on his bounty hunter boots again, as the two-time Oscar winner is set to star opposite Willem Dafoe in a new Western from legendary director Walter Hill.
Deadline broke the news, reporting that the film is called Dead for a Dollar, and it takes place in 1897 in the area of the southwest that would eventually become New Mexico. Waltz will play a famed bounty hunter named Max Borlund who is hired by a successful Sante Fe businessman to find his wife, who is said to have been kidnapped by a Black army deserter who's now holding her for ransom in Mexico. Max heads south of the border, he discovers that the woman and her alleged captor are actually lovers who fled from her abusive husband, forcing Max to decide whether to bring the woman back to the States to collect his bounty or help them escape and fight off other men who have been looking for them.
Dafoe will co-star as Max's sworn enemy, Joe Cribbens, a professional gambler and part-time outlaw who Max tracked down and sent to prison many years earlier. The two of them cross paths in Mexico, but whether they clash once again or form an unlikely partnership remains unknown.
Hill wrote the script with an assist from Matt Harris, and the film is being produced by Jeremy Wall, Kirk D’Amico and Carolyn McMaster. The project will be shopped to international buyers at the Cannes Virtual Market this week.
Dead for a Dollar will be Hill's third film in the last 20 years following 2016's The Assignment starring Michelle Rodriguez and 2012's Bullet to the Head starring Sylvester Stallone. He's best known for directing the Eddie Murphy-Nick Nolte classic 48 Hours as well as The Warriors (pictured above).
Waltz will soon reprise his villainous role as Blofeld in the next James Bond movie No Time to Die, and he also stars in two high-profile movies from A-list level auteurs -- Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. The same can be said (and more) for Dafoe, who is also in The French Dispatch and just worked with del Toro on Nightmare Alley.
Additionally, Dafoe has wrapped Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter and Robert Eggers’ The Northman, and he'll soon begin filming Yorgos Lanthimos’ new movie Poor Things with Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo. The Oscar-nominated actor is also rumored to return as Green Goblin for Spider-Man: No Way Home, though that remains unconfirmed. His pairing with Waltz in Dead for a Dollar sounds exciting, so here's hoping this Western is a return to form for 79-year-old Hill, who surely made some great films back in the day.