Hold on to your hats — director Kathryn Bigelow, who carried home Best Picture and Best Director Oscars for The Hurt Locker, is now “courting Johnny Depp to star with Tom Hanks in Triple Frontier, the drama that she will direct in February for Paramount Pictures,” reports Mike Fleming for Deadline.com. The film, scripted by The Hurt Locker’s Mark Boal, takes place in the organized crime haven that exists in the border zone between Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil; hence the title Triple Frontier, although the project may be switching titles to Sleeping Dogs. While the script has five main roles, there are two “major leads,” according to Fleming, and those would be played by JD and Hanks.

“Depp likes the role — and the idea of teaming with Hanks — but his participation is subject to working out some scheduling issues,” writes Fleming. The scheduling conflict is with the long-simmering film of Dark Shadows, which was due to begin filming “around the same time” — that is, February 2011 — for director Tim Burton at Warner Bros. “Aside from playing the vampire Barnabas Collins, Depp is producing with Graham King, so Dark Shadows is a priority,” says Fleming. “But Triple Frontier is shaping up to be a hot-button prestige project and his reps will be working hard over the next two weeks to make it possible for him to do both.” Stay tuned!

The Zone thanks Theresa for sharing the news; you can read more about this very intriguing project on the Zone’s News & Views forum.