Boyhood director Richard Linklater is set to become the latest indie film-maker to to burnish the career of Hunger Games actor Jennifer Lawrence, after it emerged that Linklater is being sought to direct The Rosie Project, a romantic comedy in which Lawrence is due to star.

According to Deadline, Linklater is the leading candidate to replace the Lego Movie directorial team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who left The Rosie Project to take over the Han Solo standalone film in the Star Wars series. The Rosie Project is an adaptation of the novel by Graeme Simsion in which a genetics professor with a list of characteristics of his ideal mate is thrown off course when he meets the apparently entirely unsuitable Rosie. Lawrence is attached to play Rosie, but no casting details of the male lead have yet been made public.

Linklater has just finished shooting his first film post-Boyhood, the “spiritual sequel” to his 70s-set high-school film Dazed and Confused; currently going under the title Everybody Wants Some, few plot details have been released other than that it is an 80s-set comedy about college baseball players. Producing studio Paramount has announced it will be released in April 2016.

Lawrence is currently filming X-Men: Apocalypse, her third and most likely final outing as shapeshifting mutant Mystique, having completed work on Joy, the biopic of Miracle Mop inventor Joy Mangano, directed by David O Russell. She has a history of working with US indie directors, including two previous films with Russell (Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle), Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, and Drake Doremus’s Like Crazy.