George Clooney seeks Jean Dujardin and Cate Blanchett for Nazi art drama

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This article titled “George Clooney seeks Jean Dujardin and Cate Blanchett for Nazi art drama” was written by Ben Child, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 4th October 2012 12.28 UTC

Oscar-winners Jean Dujardin and Cate Blanchett are being courted by George Clooney for his next venture as writer-director, for the second world war era drama The Monument’s Men, reports the Wrap.

Dujardin, star of The Artist and the first ever French winner of the best actor Academy award, is in line for a supporting role in the film, which centres on a real-life group of men and women who risked their lives to track down art stolen by the Nazis during the conflict and prevent its destruction. Blanchett is being sought for the role of Rose Valland, an art historian and member of the French resistance.

Clooney himself looks set to take a leading role as US army officer and leading art conservationist George Stout, who repatriated tens of thousands of pieces of art from the Nazis. Paul Giamatti could play New York City ballet co-founder and art connoisseur Lincoln Kirstein, who was personally involved with retrieving artworks around Munich and in the salt mines at Altaussee during the war. The casting is, however, said to be in the very early stages.

Clooney’s film, which is based on Robert Edsel’s book The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, is due to shoot in Germany, Austria, Paris and England next spring. The book centres on the 11-month period between D-Day and V-E Day when a taskforce of American and British art experts were charged with scouring Europe for lost and stolen art.

Clooney’s most recent writer-director film was the 2011 political thriller The Ides of March, which he co-wrote with Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon. He also had a hand in writing his own 2005 film Good Night, and Good Luck, about the veteran radio and television journalist Edward R Murrow.

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