Anyone who has kept a close eye on the collaborative relationship between George Clooney and the Coen brothers has heard the name Suburbicon before, perhaps on multiple occasions. There was word of it as far back as 2005, as reported by Empire Magazine, around the time Clooney was working on The Good German with Steven Soderbergh, arguably the auteur's most tedious experiment. Well now, as Deadline reports, Clooney is once again circling the project, once again eyeing to direct the script written by Joel and Ethan.

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Image via Warner Brothers

Clooney's collaborations with the Coens hasn't always yielded palatable fruit, as anyone who has sat through Intolerable Cruelty will attest, but when they hit, such as in O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the under-valued Burn After Reading, its usually quite a lot of fun, at the very least. Clooney has a zippy directing style, and his films thus far have been either clear hits (Good Night and Good Luck, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind) or misses (The Monuments Men, Leatherheads). Of course, he's also set to be at the center of the Coen brothers' new film, Hail Caeser!, the brotherly duo's moviemaking movie following the more melancholic, majestic Inside Llewyn Davis.


Little is known about the deal at present, as the whole project seems to be coming together very fast at TriStar, but its a natural collaboration that has brought on some very promising work before. And Clooney still has the kind of star appeal that makes for an appealing visual subject even when the material is thin or the filmmaking is way too plain. Its worth noting that Clooney has always done better with a sense of humor, which is true of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and, to a lesser extent, Good Night and Good Luck, and as you might have heard, the Coens do comedy fairly well.