Tom Hanks Enlists 'The Artist' Director, Natalie Portman To Make Some More Oscar Bait

Left out of Steven Spielberg's big Oscar party, Tom Hanks is putting together his own prestigious historical drama to dangle in front of Academy Awards voters. And his involves Nazis, so...

Deadline reports The Artist's Oscar-winning director, Michel Hazanavicius, is in talks to re-write and direct a Hanks-produced adaptation of Erik Larson's New York TImes nonfiction bestseller In The Garden Of Beasts. As reported back in November, Hanks would also star in the film, playing up to his safe place of being a likable everyman and really into World War II. He'll be playing William Dodd, the U.S.'s mild-mannered real-life ambassador who, over the course of living in '30s Berlin, slowly came to the realization that those Nazis guys were doing shit crazy enough to make them stock villains for generations to come. Fellow Oscar-winner Natalie Portman is in talks to play his daughter, a hot, young, Natalie Portman type who sleeps around with "the handsome men of the Third Reich and even the first chief of the Gestapo," blissfully unaware that having so many swastikas notched in her bedpost will not be a point of pride later in life. Uniforms and hints of genocide just seems so sexy at that age.