He’s just finished wrangling a dream cast of older actors (including Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman and Helen Mirren) into an effective fighting team for Red, and now director Robert Schwentke might just be looking to bring a long-gestating drama project back from the depths of development limbo, as he’s become attached like a barnacle to submarine pic Shadow Divers.
The source material for this one is Robert Knudson’s real-life tome, subtitled The True Adventures of Two Americans who Discovered Hitler’s Lost Sub, and charts what happens when a couple of divers stumble upon a sunken U-boat off the coast of New Jersey. The pair risked their lives over the next six years to bring its treasures to the surface.
Back in the day (2006, to be exact) we reported on Peter Weir signing up to direct the film with a William Broyles Jr script, and we guessed it would step before the cameras long before Weir’s other planned project at the time, an adaptation of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. Net result: zero movies.
But it’s not Weir’s fault: Shadow Divers has been in the works for years, with Ridley Scott originally set to make Broyles’ script. No such luck there either.
So given Schwentke’s own busy schedule (he’s also considering the Simon Kinberg-scripted film of Robert Ludlum’s The Osterman Weekend), we’d be silly to suggest that Divers will actually get made this time. But we will anyway! Shadow Divers will ping your cinematic radar at some point before the sun explodes and the Earth is boiled away to nothing. There! Covered! Ha!