I held off on doing this update in the morning as I wanted to get some confirmation to go with the report. I now have the thumbs up that this is definitely not a made up rumour. How close Natalie might be to signing on, I’m not sure.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The project is Garden of Beasts, which is adaptation of an Erik Larson non-fiction book of the same title. The book is about America’s ambassador to Germany prior and during World War 2. The ambassador sees the horror of Hitler’s plans unfold as his daughter becomes sexually entangled with prominent Nazi members.

The ambassador is looking like it will be Tom Hanks, Natalie is in talks to play the daughter and Michel Hazanavicious (last years Best Director for The Artist) is in negotiations to direct.

With the subject matter and Michel and Hanks, this could be quite the prestige picture. Natalie once remarked that she wasn’t a big fan of the Nazi/Jew genre of films (beyond the obvious reasons), so this story must be different enough to entice her.