First Live By Night Set Photos Send Zoe Saldana And Ben Affleck Back To The Roaring ’20s

Production on Ben Affleck’s next directorial effort Live By Night may have taken some time to ease into motion – that ol’ DC Expanded Universe is a time consumer, after all – but we’re finally beginning to see the first evidence that the actor-cum-director’s project is starting to take shape.

Case in point: today’s batch of set photos that have emerged from the film’s Californian set. Sending Affleck and his co-star Zoe Saldana back to the roaring ’20s, the film is based on Dennis Lehane’s Prohibition-era crime epic of the same name, set during a time when the bullets were flying and the liquor was flowing.

Headlining the drama as Joe Coughlin, Affleck steps into the shoes of a conniving trickster who shuns life in a decorated police family for a career on the streets, engaging in petty crimes and nine kinds of illicit activities to make ends meet. But as Coughlin’s spiral to the bottom hastens, Affleck’s lead soon finds himself in with the sharks, attracting the eye of the Boston mobsters.

It’s a stint in the limelight that he wholeheartedly embraces, too, becoming one of the more prominent outlaws in a time rife with rowdy gangsters looking to make a quick buck. Lehane’s Live By Night sent his conflicted lead on a journey from Boston to Florida to Cuba, and we’re intrigued to see how this arc plays out on the big screen. Flanking Affleck on the impressive cast list are Saldana, Sienna Miller, Elle Fanning, Chris Cooper, Scott Eastwood, Brendan Gleeson and The Mindy Project‘s Chris Messina.

Live By Night is still a ways away from a theatrical release, given that Warner Bros. has penciled in Affleck’s directorial effort for a release on December 31, 2017. Even still, it’ll be nice to look forward to one of the actor’s performances that doesn’t involve the cape and cowl.

Joe embarks on a dizzying journey up the ladder of organized crime that takes him from the flash of Jazz Age Boston to the sensual shimmer of Tampa’s Latin Quarter to the sizzling streets of Cuba. Live by Night is a riveting epic layered with a diverse cast of loyal friends and callous enemies, tough rumrunners and sultry femmes fatales, Bible-quoting evangelists and cruel Klansmen, all battling for survival and their piece of the American dream. At once a sweeping love story and a compelling saga of revenge, it is a spellbinding tour de force of betrayal and redemption, music and murder, that brings fully to life a bygone era when sin was cause for celebration and vice was a national virtue.