After plenty of fits and starts, bootlegging drama The Wettest Country** is finally underway, with Jessica Chastain now signed to join Shia LaBeouf and Tom Hardy..
Set during the Great Depression, it's based on Matt Bondurant's novel The Wettest Country in the World, a family crime saga about three brothers running a gang brewing and selling that ol' moonshine liquor. John Hillcoat (The Proposition, The Road) is directing Nick Cave's script, and Cave will also provide the soundtrack.
It's another high-profile role for the up-and-coming Chastain, who we've not seen much of previously, but is set for a far more visible 2011, playing Brad Pitt's wife in Terrence Malick's Tree of LIfe, Celia in the adaptation of Kathryn Stockett's The Help, and an unspecified part alongside Sam Worthington in T****he Fields.** **In The Wettest Country she'll play "a big city woman" now living in smalltown Virginia, with a romantic entanglement with Hardy's character. It's possibly the role that Scarlett Johansson was once interested in.
The start of shooting is pencilled in for February.