Cillian Murphy and Daniel Craig are in negotiations to star in Damien Chazelle’s next movie, Deadline is reporting. The latest feature from the Oscar-winning filmmaker, which is currently untitled, will reportedly take place in a prison. The news of the actors’ potential casting in the drama comes after the director’s previously planned project, a biopic about Evel Knievel, was cancelled.

Chazelle has written the script for, and will also direct, the prison drama. He will also produce the project with Olivia Hamilton under their Wild Chickens Productions banner.

If Murphy and Craig are cast in the movie, production is expected to begin later this year. Paramount Pictures is set to distribute the film once production is complete.

The drama reunites Chazelle with Paramount, which funded his previous theatrical feature, Babylon. The filmmaker set a first-look deal with the studio in 2022.

The news of Chazelle’s latest movie comes after the company announced last year that he was working on a biopic about stunt performer Evel Knievel. It was later reported that the movie would led by Leonardo DiCaprio as the stunt performer.

However, Paramount was unable to make a deal for the Oscar-winning actor in the biopic. So he instead decided to reunite with Martin Scorsese one more time, due to the filmmaker’s age. The director, who previously worked with the performer on six features, most recently on Killers of the Flower Moon, is 82.

Not much is known about the filmmaker and actor’s reunion feature. However, it is know that Scorsese will be helming the project from a script written by Nick Bilton. The trio will also serve as producers on the movie, alongside Dany Garcia, Lisa Frechette and Rick Yorn. The project doesn’t yet have an official title, production start date or release date.

“The film focuses on a turbulent time on the island paradise when an aspiring mob boss battled rival crime factions to wrest control of the underworld of the Hawaiian islands,” Deadline reported about DiCaprio and Scorsese’s latest film.

“It was a bloody battle, the kind of terrain Scorsese covered in both Goodfellas and The Departed. In 1960s and ’70s Hawaii, this formidable and charismatic mob boss rises to build the islands’ most powerful criminal empire, waging a brutal war against mainland corporations and rival syndicates while fighting to preserve his ancestral land. It’s based on the untold true story of a man who fought to preserve his homeland through a ruthless quest for absolute power — igniting the last great American mob saga, where the war for cultural survival takes place in the unlikeliest of places: paradise.”

As a result of DiCaprio and Scorsese reuniting on another movie, Chazelle returned to the prison drama to be his next project. At one point, the duo were working together on the prison drama before they turned their attention to the Evel Knievel biopic. The filmmaker pivoted his attention back to the prison drama after the actor dropped out of the biopic.

The news of Chazelle possibly working with Murphy and Craig on the prison drama comes after the filmmaker went on to consider several other projects after the biopic fell through.

Chazelle has attracted A-list talent for the previous movies he has directed, including Whiplash, La La Land, First Man and Babylon. For his proposed next feature, he has already met with Murphy and Craig, and the two actors are high on the list of consideration.

Murphy won an Oscar last year for starring as the titular character in scribe-helmer Christopher Nolan’s epic biopic, Oppenheimer. The actor also recently wrapped production on the Peaky Binders movie, The Immortal Man, for Netflix. He was also recently seen in Small Things Like These.

Craig wrapped his tenure as James Bond in 2021’s No Time to Die. He was most recently seen on screen in the A24 romantic period drama, Queer, for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe. Before Chazelle’s prison film, the actor will star in Greta Gerwig’s Narnia.

The actor is next set to reprise his role as Benoit Blanc in the upcoming third entry of the Knives Out series, which is titled Wake Up Dead Man. The franchise’s second follow-up will premiere later this year on Netflix.