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Johnny Depp

Johnny Depp has reached out to Colombian director Ciro Guerra to work with him, possibly on his next film, JM Coetzee adaptation Waiting For The Barbarians.

Guerra’s Birds Of Passage opened Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes Film Festival this year. He also directed the Oscar-nominated Embrace Of The Serpent.

Depp would join Mark Rylance and Robert Pattinson in the project. The producers include Michael Fitzgerald (Three Burials). The film will be Guerra’s English-language debut and was first announced in 2016. It is being lined up to shoot in autumn this year.

Coetzee, a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is adapting his own novel. The story is a political thriller published in 1980, about a British magistrate in a small colonial town who begins to question his loyalty to the Empire.

Birds Of Passage is the third film by Guerra to screen at Cannes following The Wind Journeys (Los Viajes Del Viento, Un Certain Regard, 2009) and Embrace Of The Serpent (Directors’ Fortnight, 2015).

The Orchard has fought off stiff competition in Cannes to pick up North American rights to Birds Of Passage, which Guerra co-directed with producing partner Cristina Gallego.

Read more: ‘Birds Of Passage’ star Natalia Reyes to lead ‘The Gray Beyond’ for Chile’s Jirafa (exclusive)