The Counselor (spelled The Counsellor in some markets) is a 2013 British-American crime thriller film directed by Ridley Scott and written by Cormac McCarthy. It stars Michael Fassbender as the eponymous Counselor—who gets in over his head in a drug deal around the troubled Ciudad Juarez, Mexico / Texas border area—as well as Penélope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Javier Bardem and Brad Pitt. The film deals with primal human concerns like greed, mortality, love, and trust concomitant to the theme of competition in a high stakes criminal environment, using the metaphor of predatory behaviour at the apex of the natural food chain.