Kathryn Bigelow and Tom Hardy would make a dream team in virtually any circumstances—arm-wrestling competition, capture the flag, Thanksgiving with the in-laws. Teaming them up on a movie has us already flexing our biceps and cracking our knuckles in anticipation. Though, from the sounds of it, the upcoming collaboration might not be as tense and battle-scarred as Bigelow’s last two films, Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker, or Hardy’s most famous, muscular roles like Bane in The Dark Knight Rises.

Instead, it appears to be a two-hander character drama, albeit one driven by the paranoid, dangerous atmosphere in America after 9/11. Bigelow will direct an adaptation of Anand Giridharadas’s non-fiction book The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas, with Hardy presumably playing one of the two men at the center of the remarkable true story. Mark Stroman, a self-described “American terrorist,” shot and nearly killed Raisuddin Bhuiyan, a former Bangladesh Air Force officer who had found temporary work in a Dallas mini-mart. The book follows each man’s efforts toward recovery in the ensuing decade, and Bhuiyan’s eventual attempt to re-enter the life of his would-be murderer and spare him from the death penalty.

As if Bigelow and Hardy weren’t enough of a draw, the film is set up at Megan Ellison’s Annapurna Pictures, producers of Zero Dark Thirty and American Hustle and a huge slate of other recent, great movies. Bigelow is one of very few female directors able to curate her own projects and have them produced on a large scale; we can’t wait to see what she brings us next.