By Angelina Jolie has enlisted Joel and Ethan Coen to rewrite her WWII drama Unbroken. The film is adapted from Laura Hillenbrand’s 2010 book of the same name that chronicles the life of WWII POW Lou Zamperini. According to The Hollywood Reporter, William Nicholson (Les Misérables) and Richard LaGravenese (Beautiful Creatures) both worked on previous drafts of the script.
For those unfamiliar with Zamperini, here’s how THR described the events of his life:
Zamperini was a Los Angeles high school track star who raced in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. In 1943, his Air Force plane crashed in the Pacific. He survived without food and water for 47 days, enduring shark attacks, aerial attacks and hunger before washing ashore on a Japanese island behind enemy lines, where he was held as a prisoner of war for two years and tortured by his captors.
Ever since 1987’s Raising Arizona, the Coen brothers have generally written their own films, though they did co-write The Hudsucker Proxy with Sam Raimi. If I’m not mistaken, Jolie’s Unbroken will be the first movie they’ve written for another director since Sam Raimi’s studio-addled Crimewave back in 1985.
[Via The Hollywood Reporter]