Yesterday, Lynne Ramsay made what’s most likely a massive career error by quitting Jane Got a Gun in spectacular fashion. By not showing up for work on the first day of filming, she either did the only thing she could do to take care of a personal crisis or she pulled a dick move by threatening a production and the jobs of several hundred people. Details are unclear at this point, but according to Deadline Hollywood, producer Scott Steindorff has pulled a director out of a hat to take Ramsay’s place. That filmmaker is Gavin O’Connor (Warrior, Miracle), and he’s an excellent choice for the wild west story that sees a young woman (Natalie Portman) turn to an ex to protect her husband from a gang ready to kill him. O’Connor has proven several times that he can make great adult fiction without alienating or making the tone too niche to enjoy. Not only is it surprising that the production found an available replacement so quickly, it’s downright astonishing that they found one who’se so well-suited to the material. O’Connor was working on prep for the TV series Cinnamon Girl from writer/creator Renee Zellweger, but otherwise his film focus was free beyond projects at the script level. However, there’s a chance that this sudden new employment will affect his attachment to Yakuza and The Samurai – two films that are hopefully self-descriptive. We also now get to wonder how their takes would have been different and play that What If game throughout production.

As pre-production chatter for the Brian Duffield-penned Black Listed Western Jane Got a Gun has been nothing but positive (especially when it comes to the film’s very talented cast), today’s news that director Lynne Ramsay has exited the project in spectacular fashion is nothing short of genuinely shocking and quite confusing. Deadline Hollywood reports (via The Playlist) that the film’s cast and crew (including stars Natalie Portman, Joel Edgerton, Jude Law, and Rodrigo Santoro) showed up on Monday (the project’s official first day of production) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, only to find that Ramsay “was a no-show and had abruptly dropped out of the film.” Producer Scott Steindorff “confirmed the crisis” and weighed in to Deadline in a passionate plea, saying, “I have millions of dollars invested, we’re ready to shoot, we have a great script, crew and cast…I’m shocked and so disappointed someone would do this to 150 crew members who devoted so much time, energy, commitment and loyalty to a project, and then have the director not show up. It is insane somebody would do this to other people. I feel more for the crew and their families, but we are keeping the show going on, directors are flying in, and a replacement is imminent.”

Jane Got a Gun has been an attractive package from the very beginning, seeing as it pairs a Black List script with a talented director in Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin) and a huge movie star lead in Natalie Portman (Mars Attacks). But now, as the production inches closer to a start date, it’s going to have to start filling out the rest of its cast, and a report from Vulture says that Ramsay and crew are looking to get that process started off with a bang. The story of the film is said to follow a woman (Portman) whose husband comes home one day riddled with bullet wounds and barely breathing. It turns out that her low-down dog of a hubby has gone and got himself involved with some criminal Confederates, and now they’re hot on his heels and looking to finish the job they already started. Seeing as said man is seemingly on his death bed, it falls on said woman to reach out to an ex-lover and ask him to help her defend her farm, a proposition that sounds ripe with dramatic stickiness.

Looks like Natalie Portman is coming back to Hollywood in a big, big way. THR reports that the actress will star in and produce Lynne Ramsay‘s first post-We Need to Talk About Kevin project, an intriguing Western that comes complete with a Black List script. Brian Duffield penned the film, Jane Got a Gun, which ended up on last year’s Black List of best unproduced screenplays (that list included scripts like Graham Moore’s The Imitation Game, Andrew Baldwin’s The Outsider, and John Scott’s Maggie also popped up on the list). The film is focused on “a woman whose outlaw husband returns home barely alive and riddled with bullet wounds. She is forced to reach out to an ex-lover and ask if he will help defend her farm when her husband’s gang eventually tracks him down to finish the job.” The film has reportedly spark a bit of a bidding war in Cannes. While Portman took some time off from acting after her Oscar win for Black Swan and the birth of her first child, she appears to be jumping right back in with a number of bold, meaty choices. She also has two Terrence Malick films lined up and, though she did not end up with the role, she was the Wachowskis’s first pick for their Jupiter Ascending. But can Portman go rough and tumble? Can she ever: