With both the film and Joaquin Phoenix picking up a few statuettes this awards season, it seems only logical that The Master director Paul Thomas Anderson would be looking to work with the actor once again. So it has come to pass, as Phoenix is in talks for Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon novel Inherent Vice.

If you cast your mind back to 2010, there was a time when The Master was on shaky financial ground and Inherent Vice looked to be Anderson’s next film. But then Megan Ellison stepped in with cash to make The Master and the rest is history.

Vice is a 1970s Californian detective story that sees a stoner private eye called Larry "Doc" Sportello helping a former lover who has an intriguing and ever-so-complicated shaggy-dog-story of a case involving infidelity, mental institutions and policemen called "Bigfoot".

Anderson is clearly enthused to be working on it, and has been trying to crack the script since at least 2009. “There's so much. But it's fun too, be because they're his words, and it's like taking your dad's car for a ride, y'know?” he told our Damon Wise at the Venice Film Festival last year. “It’ll be like a Cheech and Chong movie. Adapting Pynchon's work is just gonna be great and, hopefully, fun."

Robert Downey Jr had been seriously considering the lead role, but he passed, leaving the way clear for Phoenix.