J.C. Chandor is one of the more in-demand directors in Hollywood when it comes to prestige movies, and now it looks like he may have determined his next project. According to Deadline, Chandor is in talks to step into the directing chair on Triple Frontier, the drama vacated by director Kathryn Bigelow and her writer/producing partner, Mark Boal, last year.
Not much is known about the script, written by Boal, except that it is set in South America, in an area filled with organized crime, between the borders of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. The project is supposedly something of an ensemble piece, with five main roles. Both Tom Hanks and Will Smith were believed to have been circling the project back when Bigelow and Boal were attached, and apparently both actors are still interested. Bigelow and Boal left the project to work on one about the real-life story of Bowe Bergdahl, the U.S. soldier who supposedly abandoned his platoon and was held captive in Afghanistan until our government worked out an exchange of soldiers with the Taliban.
Chandor was to have followed up A Most Violent Year with the real-life oil rig disaster movie Deepwater Horizon, but he instead only wrote the script for that movie, with Peter Berg handling directing duties. It was recently announced that Chandor would produce and potentially direct the adaptation of the novel The Liar’s Ball. However, because the script for that still needs to be written, and because there is already a Boal-written draft of Triple Frontier, it seems safe to assume that the latter will now be Chandor’s next directing project.