Weir Goes to War (WW II, that is) with Farrell, Sturgess

Colin Farrell, rarely unemployed long, though looking a bit chilly while shooting In Bruges.

Variety reports that Peter Weir has cast Colin Farrell, Jim Sturgess, Saoirse Ronan and Ed Harris in his upcoming film “The Way Back.” Weir wrote the script from Slavomir Rawicz’s memoir of the true-life tale of soldiers escaping from a Siberian gulag in 1942.

Variety says “Farrell plays a tough, tattooed Russian; Harris an American; and Sturgess portrays a young Polish inmate. Ronan will play a Russian on the run who meets up with the fugitives.” In other words, it’s one of those good old-fashioned ”groups of disparate strangers, preferably representing a number of different ethnicities and backgrounds, who are thrown together by the tides of war” WW II movies.

Weir actually hasn’t directed any features since “Master and Commander” in 2003 (which I quite liked by the way; good casting). I like him well enough, but nothing he’s done in Hollywood has come close to his Australian movies of the ’70s and early ’80s–”The Year of Living Dangerously, “Gallipoli,” and of course, the legendary “Picnic at Hanging Rock.” It would be nice to see this one be more in that direction than some of his other, later films.

As for the cast, hmm…all I can say is that I have a friend who met Colin Farrell at an event a few years ago and she said he was very charming and tiny.