Australian director David Michod has signed on to write and direct a new film starring and produced by Brad Pitt.
According to numerous trade reports, Michod, the writer-director of Animal Kingdom and the forthcoming outback thriller The Rover, will direct The Operators.
Pitt's production company Plan B – which also produced World War Z and 12 Years A Slave – will make the film in partnership with RatPac Entertainment, the production company established late last year by James Packer and Brett Ratner.
The Operators is based on a book of the same name by Michael Hastings, which grew out of a June 2010 article for Rolling Stone. It covers the rise and fall of General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan prior to the appointment of General David Petraeus.
McChrystal resigned from his post in June 2010, after the publication of the article, in which he and aides close to him were openly critical of the Obama administration and President Obama himself (this despite the fact McChrystal had voted for Obama in 2008).
"Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was," one aide reportedly said of the first meeting between McChrystal and the President in early 2009. "Here's the guy who's going to run his f---ing war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss [McChrystal] was pretty disappointed."
The hook-up with Pitt is a huge vote of confidence in Michod ahead of the June release of The Rover.
The film stars Guy Pearce and Twilight star Robert Pattinson, and was shot in the South Australian desert in early 2013. It is hotly tipped to feature in the line-up at the Cannes film festival, which begins on May 14.
Michod told Fairfax last year his film takes place "in an unspecified relatively near future, after a number of years of quite seriously steady Western economic decline.
"It's not post-apocalypse. This is an Australia that has broken down into a kind of resource-rich Third World country."
