After a five year gap since MASTER & COMMANDER, Peter Weir is on THE WAY BACK!!

By Matt Holmes / June 25, 2011

Peter Weir, the uber talented director of MASTER AND COMMANDER and THE TRUMAN SHOW, and who was my ideal choice to direct THE HOBBIT if Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro didn't want it, has cast his next movie. It's a fact-based World War II movie about a group of soldiers who engineered a grueling escape from a Siberian gulag in 1942. Weir wrote the script based on Slavomir Rawicz's memoirs. Variety say it's titled THE WAY BACK and if talks go well it will star... Colin Farrell as a tough, tattooed Russian (what's with Hollywood stars taking on Russian roles these days?)... Ed Harris, who was wonderful in Weir's THE TRUMAN SHOW will play an American. Jim Sturgess will portray a young Polish inmate. Ya know, if Weir was directing THE HOBBIT... something tells me he might have cast Sturgess as young Bilbo Baggins. Saoirse Ronan will play a Russian on the run who meets up with the fugitives. Production begins March in Bulgaria and it's financed by Spitfire Pictures through its Cyrte Investments-backed holding company HS Media.