Pete Travis has come on board to direct Come Like Shadows for Smuggler Films.

Travis is in development now on the project, described as “an adaptation of Macbeth to be told in modern filmic language.”

Vincent Regan adapted the story with Harvard scholars Jennifer Lee Carrell and Nick Saunders.


Travis recently directed Sundance political thriller Endgame. His past projects include IRA story Omagh produced by Paul Greengrass and Sony’s Vantage Point starring Dennis Quaid and Forest Whitaker.

Smuggler’s Patrick Milling Smith and John Hart (Revolutionary Road, You Can Count On Me) will produce the film with Nick Saunders.

Travis says Come Like Shadows is “a bold, sexy addition to my slate of films. It’s a powerful, tragic morality tale about personal and political corruption. An awesome, epic story for our troubled times, its irresistible tension holds the audience in a vice like grip, its raw emotion will break their hearts.”

In a joint statement, Hart and Smith of Smuggler Films added: “Pete immediately intuited the parallels of modern politics, where relationships between states are abrogated for selfish means. But Pete’s inclination to frame these issues in sexual persuasion and brutality to its end make this Macbeth much more in the vein of The Godfather than its predecessors in feeling and tone.”