Peter Weir, who last directed the vastly underrated Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, is getting nautical again with his next film, Shadow Divers. A long in development movie – once rumored to be Ridley Scott’s – it’s based on a book of the same title (with the additional subtitle “The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Discovered Hitler’s Lost Sub,” but I think Master and Commander may have weaned Weir from lengthy subtitles) about two world-class divers who discover a sunken U-Boat off the coast of New Jersey. They spend six years trying to identify the sub despite personal danger and the fact that their obsessions begin destroying their lives.
The exceptionally nice Bill Broyles has written the script, and he’ll be executive producing the film. Weir, meanwhile, is also in development on Pattern Recognition, based on the William Gibson novel. I think this is the first time I’m hearing about that, although if I search the CHUD archives I probably wrote about it two years ago.