World War Woo

Face Off director, John Woo, is to take the helm of a new World War II action/drama affair called Windtalkers. Scripted by John Rice and Joe Batteer - the pens behind the Jeff Bridges starrer, Blown Away - the United Artists pic relates the story of an Anglo GI assigned to protect a Navajo whose inscrutable native language is used as code in radio transmissions to confound the Japanese. Woo will also produce with Terence Chang, Alison Rosenzweig and Tracie Graham. Explaining why he plumped for this project, UA executive VP Jeff Kleeman said: "Like everybody else in town we were thinking, 'Wouldn't it be great to be in business with John Woo and Terence Chang?'" He added: "It's a great pitch, and the story is a kind of a secret history of WWII. It's not about events and battles we all learned in school. It's about events that are rarely spoken of."