Russell Crowe announced last year that, after years of trying and projects popping up but then vanishing again, he was ready to make his directorial debut with Battle of Gallipoli tale **The Water Diviner. Production on the film has been complete for a while, but before any trailer arrives, Crowe has an introduction to his film ready in the form of a featurette.
Written by Andrew Knight and Andrew Anastasios, the film follows an Australian man (Crowe) who travels to Turkey in an attempt to discover what happened to his three sons, who disappeared during the fateful conflict.
A brutal, months-long campaign by the Allies to remove the Ottoman Empire out of World War I, the battle saw the ANZACs (Australian and New Zealand) suffer more than 26,000 casualties. But it wasn’t just those countries involved, and the story explores the relationships the soldiers struck up with, among other people, Turkish nationals.
The featurette, with Crowe solemnly narrating, takes us through the first inklings of the script, through his scouting and shooting sessions and explores why he thought it was a good film to serve as his first stab at fiction filmmaking. With Olga Kurylenko, Jai Courtney, Ylmaz Erdogan and Cem Yilmaz in the cast, **The Water Diviner **will be out later this year.