Johnny Depp is close to the signing on the dotted line to play Mexican revolutionary hero Pancho Villa in a new biopic.
The film, set to be directed by Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica, has a completed script from Kusturica and regular co-writer Gordon Mihac, though if Depp does take the part (as seems increasingly likely), filming will not be able to begin until 2011 due to the actor’s prior commitments. Depp has worked with Kusturica before, on the 1993 film “Arizona Dream”. Entitled “Seven Friends of Pancho Villa and the Woman with Six Fingers”, the biopic will be filmed in Spanish and shot at least partly in Mexico and is being funded by French studio Fidelite, which also handled producing duties on the director’s “Maradona” biopic. It is believed that Salma Hayek is also close to signing on to appear in the picture.
Villa has previously been played in films by Antonio Banderas, Telly Savalas, and even by Villa himself in the 1914 film “The Life of General Villa”, which was produced by D.W. Griffith. Given the likely 2011 start date, Kusturica is set to shoot another new film prior to “Seven Friends”, in the form of “Cool Water”, a dark comedy set during the conflict in the Middle East and focusing on Palestinian woman who is working as a stripper in Germany, who is forced to return to her homeland in order to bury her father. That film is being produced by the independent German film studio Brave New Work.
