by Josh Grossberg
Tue, 23 Oct 2007 12:57:43 PM PDT

When you got a good thing going, why stop now?

After last year’s hit The Departed earned a Best Picture Oscar and the elusive Best Director trophy for Martin Scorsese, the director and his current go-to actor, Leonardo DiCaprio, have reportedly settled on a fourth collaboration.

This time around, according to Variety, the dynamic duo is planning to adapt Dennis Lehane’s 2003 crime novel Shutter Island.

Set in 1954, the story revolves around a U.S. marshal (DiCaprio) probing the disappearance of a female killer from a prison hospital for the criminally insane located on the isolated Shutter Island. As he and his partner begin to unravel the mysteries of the facility, a major hurricane cuts off all access to the mainland—stirring echoes of Scorsese’s 1991 remake of Cape Fear.

Lehane’s work has become prime film fodder in recent years, with Clint Eastwood’s successful screen version of Mystic River in 2003 and the just-released Ben Affleck-helmed Gone Baby Gone, which is already garnering Academy Award buzz.

However, DiCaprio’s publicist, Ken Sunshine, cautions fans not to get too excited. “Nothing is confirmed, it’s all speculation,” he tells E! Online.

If Shutter Island does pan out, it will follow the pair’s string of Oscar-bait hits: 2002’s Gangs of New York, 2004’s The Aviator and 2006’s The Departed.

In any case, DiCaprio would remain four flicks shy of Robert De Niro, who made eight films with Scorsese and is poised to possibly add one more to the canon as he’s reportedly attached to a new mob drama the latter is developing called Frankie Machine. (Another of the director’s favorites, Harvey Keitel, has made a half-dozen films with Scorsese.)

Scorsese and DiCaprio also have another project on the drawing board: The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. The biopic would focus on the prepresidential Roosevelt’s exploits, including his stint commanding the Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War. But there’s no word yet on a start date.

Scorsese and DiCaprio were also said to be eyeing The Wolf of Wall Street, a drama based on the autobiography of high-flying New York stockbroker Jordan Belfort, whose appetite for drugs, prostitutes and big-money schemes landed him in prison.

Per the Los Angeles Times, Wolf remains in a holding pattern as Paramount and Warner Bros. attempt to work out a deal—the film was set up at Warners, but Scorsese recently inked a deal with Paramount.

In any case, Scorsese has plenty in the pipeline to keep him off the streets, including the Rolling Stones concert film Shine a Light, due in April, a feature-length documentary on George Harrison and the historical epic Silence, about two Jesuit priests in 17th-century Japan.

As for DiCaprio, the actor recently signed on to costar with George Clooney in Farragut North, a political drama loosely based on Howard Dean’s presidential candidacy in 2004.

He’s currently in Morocco filming Ridley Scott’s terrorism thriller Body of Lies, opposite Russell Crowe; he is also attached to the action-adventures Freedom Within the Heart and The Chancellor Manuscript, the latter based on a Robert Ludlum novel.

As for Shutter Island, Variety says location scouting will take place over the next two months in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Nova Scotia, and shooting could start in early 2008.

Source: E News