Angelina Jolie is a woman on the go! The actress, activist, and mother-of-six will be donning a director’s cap once more this fall after confirming that her sophomore directorial effort, Unbroken, has both a distributor and a lead, British actor Jack O’Connell.Jolie, 37, will begin filming for the World War II-era drama this fall, and was seen scouting for locations in Hawaii as recently as Monday, July 8.
The film will also have some major Hollywood writing muscle behind it. Oscar winners Joel and Ethan Coen — who took home the top prize for No Country for Old Men in 2008 — will be adapting the script, based on a novel by Seabiscuit author Laura Hillenbrand called Unbroken: A World War II Story of Surivival, Resilience, and Redemption.
Jolie’s first film was 2011’s In the Land of Blood and Honey, which told the story of Danijel, a soldier fighting for the Serbs in the Bosnian War.
The tale will follow the life story of Olympian and war hero Louis “Louis” Zamperini (O’Connell) as he survives a fatal plane crash aboard a raft for 47 days before being captured by the Japanese Navy and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp.
“I’ve had the privilege of spending a great deal of time with Louie Zamperini, who is a hero of mine, and now — I am proud to say — a dear friend,” the actress said in a statement, according to Yahoo News. “I am deeply honored to be telling his extraordinary story, and I will do my absolute best to give him the film he deserves. I am grateful to Universal for making this film a priority.”
Unbroken will mark Jolie’s first major project since undergoing a double mastectomy earlier this year, a preventative procedure that dropped her chances of developing breast cancer from 87 percent to 5 percent.
“I can tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer,” she wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times in May. “It is reassuring that they see nothing that makes them uncomfortable. They can see my small scars and that’s it. Everything else is just Mommy, the same as she always was.”
This article originally appeared on Usmagazine.com: Angelina Jolie to Direct Actor Jack O’Connell in World War II Film Unbroken
– Yahoo News
