With Water For Elephants due out in a few months time, I Am Legend director Francis Lawrence is looking to his next gig, and it appears he’s thinking of going World War II. Deadline reports that Universal has bought the rights to the bestselling book Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand (Seabiscuit), and is in talks for Lawrence to direct and wants Crazy Heart helmer Scott Cooper to write the script.
The book is about Louis Zamperini, a former Olympic track prodigy who endured unimaginable hardship as a WWII POW. Zamperini went from being a troubled, depression era troublemaker in his childhood to becoming the ‘Torrance Tornado’, the youngest American to compete on the US team. He ran in the 1936 Berlin olympics, where he met Hitler.
However the outbreak of war saw him join the Air Force and go on several highly dangerous bombing runs. During one of those his plane crashed, but he managed to survive for 47 days on a makeshift raft, before being captured by the Japanese and sent to a hellhole known as Execution Island. He suffered immense hardships, especially after refusing to read anti-American propaganda statements for the Japanese. While haunted by his experiences during the war, he finally found peace by managing to forgive his tormentors.
It’s an incredible story, which could make an incredible film, although one that doesn’t exactly sound like it’d be a huge amount of fun to sit through. At the moment, Lawrence is only in talks to direct, but expect to hear more soon.