How Justified: City Primeval Has Some Help From Quentin Tarantino

Justified: City Primeval got some surprising help from Quentin Tarantino according to the FX series showrunners. Dave Andron ad Michael Dinner sat down with Entertainment Weekly to tell that wild story. When the series was announced, a lot of people wondered if more Justified was even necessary? Andron had fun with that idea during the interview. "Well, we wanted to make sure we f---ed it up," he joked. "We ended it so well. Why would we leave well enough alone?" However, these two creatives weren't the only one eyeing Elmore Leonard's City Primeval, the legendary director was too. While Tarantino was thinking of doing a movie treatment, one conversation with Timothy Olyphant changed everything. 

Dinner explained, "One day the phone rang and it was Tim Olyphant who said, 'I've been sitting on the set with Quentin, and we were talking about this book, City Primeval. We thought it would make a great year of Justified.' So we started kicking around the idea, and FX was into it. It was very complicated to put together because the rights situation was a little murky — part of the rights belonged to the estate, part belonged to MGM which was going to make this movie several times, and it took a while to get it going, but then we did."

How Justified: City Primeval Came to Be

The showrunners also talked about how the idea of continuing Marshall Raylan Givens' story. With City Primeval being out for a long time, they were far from the first creators to think of an adaptation. But, they did have a unique vision about why the story would be better suited to a TV or streaming series. The duo explained it in the interview above.

"We thought we ended it well, and we thought we were done. We thought we rode it into the sunset, and some series, you don't get to do that — they pull a plug and you don't get to feel a sense of completion and you regret the fact that you couldn't end it the right way. We thought we did," Dinner continued. "We never intended to go back into the waters. But there was this book, City Primeval, which is kind of a crown jewel of Elmore Leonard's work. It was his first Detroit crime novel and that kicked off his becoming the preeminent writer of American crime fiction."

"A lot of people had wanted to make this book before. It almost got made by [Sam] Peckinpah years ago as a movie, and [Quentin] Tarantino wanted to make it as a movie, and a lot of people wanted to play with it in television, streaming or cable," he mentioned. "We had a great experience doing Justified, and some years later Elmore's son had approached me about doing it as its own thing. I'd always loved the book, we always referenced it when we were in the writers' room on the original series, and so that was the intention: It was going to be its own thing."

What Is Justified: City Primeval About?

FX is excited to dive back into the world of Justified: "Having left the hollers of Kentucky 15 years ago, Raylan Givens now lives in Miami, a walking anachronism balancing his life as a U.S. Marshal and part-time father of a 15-year-old girl. His hair is grayer, his hat is dirtier, and the road in front of him is suddenly a lot shorter than the road behind."

"A chance encounter on a desolate Florida highway sends him to Detroit. There he crosses paths with Clement Mansell, aka The Oklahoma Wildman, a violent, sociopathic desperado who's already slipped through the fingers of Detroit's finest once and aims to do so again. Mansell's lawyer, formidable Motor City native Carolyn Wilder, has every intention of representing her client, even as she finds herself caught in between cop and criminal, with her own game afoot as well. These three characters set out on a collision course in classic Elmore Leonard fashion, to see who makes it out of the City Primeval alive."

Are you surprised that the director ended up playing a part in the revival? Let us know down in the comments!