Between Invictus and the upcoming Hereafter Clint Eastwood has been seeming pretty attached to Matt Damon lately, but he now seems to be lining up to work with Damon's Departed costar Leonardo DiCaprio instead. Deadline Hollywood reports that DiCaprio is in talks to star in Hoover, the biopic about J. Edgar Hoover that was written by Milk Oscar winner Dustin Lance Black and which Eastwood plans to direct next.

Production will begin later this year, reports Mike FLeming in a piece that also gets into the details on why Universal passed on the project in order for it to wind up at Warner Bros. One studio is famously sinking fast precisely from funding expensive period pieces like Public Enemies or Eastwood's own Changeling, while the other is about to launch a practically guaranteed hit with DiCaprio in the lead (Christopher Nolan's Inception). You see how these things happen.

Hoover was a contemporary of Howard Hughes, another character DiCaprio is famous for playing, so it will be interesting to see how the two takes match up. While we mostly now think of Hoover as the cross-dresser who helped build the FBI by spying on a whole lot of people, Deadline writes that the movie has a more sympathetic take-- makes sense, I guess, from the guy who gave Harvey Milk a wet, sloppy kiss with his first screenplay. It will be funny to see this movie as a collaboration between people recently responsible for three very different kind of biopics-- Eastwood of the dull-as-dishwater Invictus, DiCaprio of the good-but-flawed The Aviator, and Black of the marvelous Milk. May Hoover bring out the best in all three.