Japanese actor Ken Watanabe, who you'd know from movies like Batman Begins, Letters From Iwo Jima and the upcoming Inception, apparently wants to step into directing. And rumor has it, he might be making a film about World War II's famed 442nd unit of Japanese American soldiers.
There have been various attempts to make a narrative feature about this story for years, with different degrees of success -- Only the Brave and Go For Broke! immediately come to mind. But it's never really gotten the big-budget Hollywood epic treatment.
And this is the kind of story that seems tailor-made for a movie: Japanese American citizens thrown into internment camps, who go on to become the most decorated unit in the history of the U.S. armed forces. Of course, there's the pesky fact that it would have to star a lot of Asian faces.
I have always hoped that when the time was right, a capable Asian American director would be at the helm of the definitive 442nd movie, with a huge Hollywood studio budget worthy of a World War II epic. Or perhaps a Band of Brothers or The Pacific-styled HBO miniseries. How cool would that be?
Sooner or later, somebody was going to make the 44nd story into movie. I don't know if I'm crazy about first-time director Ken Watanabe and the Gran Torino producer being the ones to do it, but the project is as yet unconfirmed. So we'll have to see where this goes. More here: Ken Watanabe Directing 442nd?
*
