Los Angeles, California – It took long enough, but there might be no better year to embark on the project than apocalyptic 2021: Don DeLillo's cool, tragicomic, and catastrophic novel White Noise will become a movie. Noah Baumbach, master of domestic catastrophe, will direct it, with Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig to star.

The National Book Award-winning satire, first published in 1985, tells the story of Hitler Studies professor Jack Gladney and his fourth (or fifth?) wife, Babette. Their tidy Midwestern lives are upended after a train accident unleashes an "airborne toxic event."

The novel is considered one of the best by DeLillo, a leading author of heady, sweeping (and rarely adapted) fiction who went on to write Underworld. White Noise had a major influence on contemporary literature, up to Rumaan Alam's eerie Leave the World Behind, also slated to become a film.

Baumbach has been nominated twice for the Academy Award for original screenplay – for The Squid and the Whale (2005) and Marriage Story (2019), both of which explore the intricacies of divorce and both of which he also directed.

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Gerwig, Baumbach's partner, has been nominated for screenplays of Little Women and Lady Bird, with the latter also earning her an Academy nod for director. Driver was nominated for best actor in Marriage Story.

The new film would be Baumbach's first adaptation of a novel; DeLillo has seen two novels adapted – Cosmopolis and The Body Artist – but neither had much impact.

This would represent a reunion of sorts for the three talents, who last worked together on Baumbach's Frances Ha.

Per the Production Weekly listing, shooting is slated to begin in June.