While George Clooney has more than few options for his next directorial outing, it seems "The Monuments Men" is picking up steam. First announced at the beginning of the year, the movie sounds like — as one writer of the site said: "The Train" meets "Inglourious Basterds" but as directed by Clooney and therefore potentially awesome. Now toss in a potential cast that includes Jean Dujardin, Cate Blanchett and Paul Giamatti? Yeah, we'd be all over that.
Those are the names that The Wrap reports are being kicked around and/or sought for the movie. A big-budget adaptation of Robert M. Edsel's "The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History," the film is set up at Sony and will tell the story of a hand-picked group of American and British art experts chosen by the U.S. government to try to retrieve artwork stolen by the Nazis. Clooney will also star in th movie, as U.S. army officer George Stout, an art conservationist who repatriated thousands of works from Nazi hands. Blanchett would take the role of a French resistance fighter and art historian, with Giamaitti as as Lincoln Kirstein, the co-founder of the New York City Ballet. No word on what Dujardin's proposed role would be, but he would be in supporting.
Clooney has a history with everyone here, save Dujardin, but he knows good talent when he sees it. He co-starred with Blanchett in another film set in (almost) the same era, "The Good German" (where she sported a German accent instead of the French one she'll probably put on here). And of course, Giamatti had a pretty plum part in "Ides Of March." Casting is apparently still in early stages, but we should be hearing more hopefully soon as shooting will take place next spring in Germany, Austria, Paris and England.
