Dallas Buyers Club director Jean-Marc Vallée is currently busy setting up his next film, Demolition. He already has Jake Gyllenhaal and Naomi Watts in line to star and is adding to the acting quotient with the ever-reliable Chris Cooper.
Demolition focuses on a young investment banker (Gyllenhaal) who falls into an emotional disconnect after his wife dies. Deciding to tear his life apart to discover what went wrong, he becomes obsessed with the idea of destruction. But eventually he meets and befriends a single mother (Watts), who helps him to turn things around. She’s not your average meet-sort-of-cute, though: she’s the pot-smoking customer service operative for the vending machine company whose money-eating metal monstrosity sends Gyllenhaal into a rage.
Deadline’s report offers no details on what role Cooper would take, but we’re glad to see him in the line-up. Last seen in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and August: Osage County, Cooper is next set to appear in a drama called Chickadee. Demolition, which Vallée is making as his follow-up to Reese Witherspoon pic Wild (which has been winning plaudits at the Toronto Film Festival), should shoot after that.