Aussie filmmaker Peter Weir takes his sweet time between projects (five years from Truman Show to Master and Commander), and now he’ll be delaying again — he’s just left Johnny Depp’s Shantaram and did not allow the door to strike his buttocks upon exiting.

Can you guess why Weir departed the production despite at least half a year of development? If you said "creative differences", you win a free trip to Aruba*! Even after a rewrite from Oscar winner Eric Roth, Weir and the studio weren’t on the same page, thus leaving the director’s chair empty.

The epic tale, based on events in the life of the book’s author Gregory Roberts, will (eventually) feature Depp as an Australian man who escapes from a hellish prison and journeys to India and beyond, where he ends up doing everything from playing doctor to laundering money and forging passports to engaging in guerrilla warfare against Russians.

The studio is still hoping to find a capable director to start shooting in the first half of 2007. Perhaps Weir will now return to a previous project like The War Magician or William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition.

*Offer only valid in Dimension X