Jacques Audiard, Oscar nominee and two-time BAFTA winner, made a real name for himself two years ago with the Academy Award-nominated French film, A Prophet.

The writer and director has now attached Marion Cotillard, herself an Oscar and BAFTA winner, to lead his next project, Rust And Bone, an adaptation of a short story collection by Craig Davidson, ComingSoon.net report.

The project will see Audiard working with Thomas Bidegain again, with whom he co-wrote A Prophet, and their success with that film certainly suggests that the pair re-teaming for another project, with an Oscar-winning actress attached, is a solid move.

Taken from Amazon’s synopsis for the short stories, this is the kind of thing we might expect from the new film:

“A strong stomach, an open mind and a morbid sense of humor are essential to enjoying Davidson’s accomplished, macabre first collection. Calamity lurks around every corner, these stories suggest, and you never know when fate will smite you—only that it will. Davidson catapults his characters (sex addicts, fighters, gamblers and drinkers) into ingeniously grim situations that test their will. In “Rocket Ride,” a young man who loses his leg to the orca he performs with in a marine park show tries to rebuild his life, in part by attending meetings of the Unlimbited Potential support group, which is full of substance-abusing amputees who wonder if karma’s to blame for their plights. In the gruesome “A Mean Utility,” a normal-seeming couple—an ad exec and his wife, a nurse—breed and fight vicious dogs, while in the sad “On Sleepless Roads,” a repo man leaves one night’s job not with the camper he was supposed to reclaim, but with the destitute man’s hamster and guinea pig, which he brings home to his disabled wife. Davidson, 30, is a fine young writer with a keen sense of the absurd and a bracing, biting wit, but his focus on gore may keep many readers from appreciating his obvious talent.”

Exactly where Cotillard’s character comes in, I’m not entirely sure. The main characters in the short stories mentioned here are predominantly male, with the exception of the wife in A Mean Utility. So it awaits to be seen how this will work out. It could be that there’s a short story in there that has at its focus a female central character, or it could be that A Mean Utility will be the focus of Audiard and Bidegain’s adaptation, with Cotillard playing the nurse wife.

Whatever the specifics of the plot turn out to be, it sounds like this is a project with much potential. The writers, director, and cast are all fantastic so far, which is naturally always good news.

Cotillard was last seen in Christopher Nolan’s Inception and French film, Little White Lies, and we can look forward to seeing more of her this year with Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris and Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion both due out next month. And let us of course not forget that she is attached to Nolan’s final instalment in his Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises. That too is a film I can’t wait for.