A year after it seemed to be doomed for good, John Hillcoat's follow-up to his adaptation of The Road, another adaptation of Matt Bondurant's The Wettest County in the World, is finally going again. Last week we learned that Shia LaBeouf, who has been on board the project from the beginning, and Tom Hardy would be playing two of the brother involved in bootlegging in Prohibition-era Virginia, and now THR reports that Jessica Chastain is on board to play a love interest for Hardy's character.

The character is a woman from to the big city who has relocated to the Virginia small town where the Bondurant boys-- the grandfather and great-uncles of the book's author-- run the town with a bootlegging organization. Chastain has yet to appear in a major role onscreen, but she's got a lead role in Terrence Malick's forthcoming Tree of Life in addition to the adaptation of Kathryn Stockett's novel The Help starring Emma Stone and The Fields, a thriller with Sam Worthington and Chloe Moretz.

The Wettest County, the project that once seemed to represent the death of independent cinema when Hillcoat mourned it a year ago, is finally set to start shooting in February. It's good news for LaBeouf, who has stuck with the project all along, and anyone who likes seeing interesting, independent projects get made.