Casey Affleck joins David Lowery’s elderly bank robber movie in non-bank-robbing role

We here at The A.V. Club are quite fond of the recent remake of Pete’s Dragon, a family film of rare integrity that found onetime micro-indie jack-of-all-trades David Lowery moving into the big leagues as a writer-director. We’re happy to learn, then, that Lowery is already busy prepping his next film: The Old Man And The Gun, based on a 2003 New Yorker article about Forrest “Woody” Tucker, a career criminal who started during the Great Depression and continued robbing banks into the late 1990s, in the process escaping from prison 18 times.

Variety reports that Casey Aflleck, who starred in Lowery’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, will reunite with the director to play a detective who trails Tucker during his final string of bank robberies. Robert Redford, who plays a supporting role in Pete’s Dragon, will star as Tucker. The project, which was first announced way back in 2013, is one of several Lowery has been juggling in recent years (including Peter Pan and a sci-fi project with Affleck that seems to have been abandoned), but is now slated to start filming in Ohio in early spring of next year.