Kathryn Bigelow Teams With ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Scribe Mark Boal for Detroit True Crime Drama

Kathryn Bigelow hasn’t made a film since Zero Dark Thirty, but given the greatness of her last couple of features, it’s hardly surprising that the director has taken her time in carefully selecting her next project. We’ve been patiently waiting to see what Bigelow will deliver next, and it looks as though she’s finally lined up another film. Bigelow will re-team with Zero Dark Thirty screenwriter Mark Boal for a true crime drama set in Detroit in the ’60s.

Per Variety, Bigelow will direct and produce the untitled film, which re-teams her with Boal and Annapurna’s Megan Ellison. Plot details are scarce, but the film is set during the harrowing Detroit riots in the summer of 1967, and examines the system racism of the period. Boal has been researching and developing the screenplay for some time now.

If you’ve been listening to Serial Season 2, you’ve heard Boal in conversation with Bowe Bergdahl, the army officer who went AWOL and was captured and held hostage in Afghanistan for almost five years. Bergdahl has not spoken at such length, publicly, about his imprisonment, though he did speak with Boal and the recordings of those talks have been made available to Serial.

Boal previously wrote the screenplays for Bigelow’s Oscar-nominated Zero Dark Thirty and Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker. Bigelow was recently rumored to be on the short list to direct the Tomb Raider reboot, though those rumors were immediately denied and many suspected she would have something less mainstream up her sleeve to make for a fitting follow-up.