Robert Pattinson will take the lead role of an astronaut operating beyond the borders of our solar system in the new science-fiction film from Zadie Smith and Claire Denis, reports ScreenDaily.

The British star of the Twilight films and David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis was confirmed in the role by Paris-based production company Alcatraz Film. Smith, author of the award-winning, bestselling novel White Teeth, was recruited in June to write the screenplay with her husband, Nick Laird, and Denis.

The untitled project will be French writer-director Denis’ first film in English, as well as Smith’s debut screenwriting gig. It is reportedly set beyond the solar system in a “future that seems like the present”.

Alcatraz Film told ScreenDaily: “We are very proud and very happy, as is Claire, about what will be a great collaboration. Robert is committed to the project and we are committed to him.”

Pattinson will be seen next in Anton Corbijn’s Life as the 1950s photographer Dennis Stock, who captured some of the most iconic images of a pre-fame James Dean during a cross-country road trip in 1955. He has also signed up for a return to big-budget fare in James Gray’s The Lost City of Z, about the 1920s explorer Percy Fawcett, who disappeared in the Amazon while looking for an ancient city.

Claire Denis is known for Beau Travail, a loose reworking of Herman Melville’s novella Billy Budd, and White Material, about a French coffee farmer working in an African state during a civil war. Her last film was Bastards (2013), a revenge thriller praised by Peter Bradshaw for its “macabre and dreamlike” quality.

Denis’ film is one of a number of new space-themed dramas commissioned in the wake of box-office success for Alfonso Cuarón’s Oscar-winning Gravity in 2013 and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar last year. The highest-profile of the lot is the $150m-budgeted Passengers, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt as interstellar travellers who awake from cryogenic sleep almost a century too early, and embark on a romance.