Having jumped onto everyone’s radar with 2011′s excellent Belgian crime film Bullhead, it was only a matter of time before director Michael R. Roskam was brought over to the United States to work his magic in Hollywood. And now we know where he’s going to start. Deadline reports that Focus Features has signed on Roskam to direct The Tiger, the feature film adaptation of John Vaillant‘s 2011 nonfiction novel of the same name. The novel recounts the struggles of a village in the Russian province of Primorye, who came face to face with a human-killing Amur tiger in the late 1990′s. The Tiger recounts a team of trackers who are tasked with hunting down the man-killing tiger, whose starved and injured state makes him that much more vicious.

The Tiger was originally going to be directed by Darren Aronofksy (let’s be honest, what movie hasn’t he been attached to at some point?), but he left the production to instead work on his Biblical epic Noah starring Russell Crowe. Screenwriting duties on The Tiger were handled by Guillermo Arriaga, who may be best known for being behind the script for 2006′s Babel (so you either just got that much more excited or groaned audibly). Expect more news on The Tiger in the coming months.

For those of you who haven’t seen Bullhead I strongly urge you to check it out; it’s a mesmerizing movie that deserved the Best Foreign Language Film nomination earlier this year at the Oscars. Couple that with the fact that The Tiger sounds absolutely fascinating (I like when movies go “man vs. wild”) and we’ve got a film that has a ton of potential. A good, if a bit surprising (going from crime drama to “real-life monster” movie is an odd step), way to bring Roskam to American shores.

Any interest in seeing The Tiger? Will Roskam adapt well to American filmmaking, or will he fall flat on his face like so many other promising foreign directors before him?