Chris McQuarrie visits No Man's Land

He’s recently polished off co-writing World War Two drama Valkyrie (about a plot to kill Hitler for Bryan Singer that has just added Kenneth Branagh to its Tom Cruise-heavy cast) and now Chris McQuarrie is stepping further back in time.

His next project will be World War One drama No Man’s Land. It’s a apparently a much bigger project, using fictional characters – an American ambulance driver in France, a British soldier falsely accused of cowardice and a German soldier in the trenches – it will look at the complicated reasons that various European powers used for the conflict and how the encroaching technology (guns, tanks etc) added to the bloodshed.

"The First World War has been effectively depicted, but I've never seen it adequately explained," McQuarrie told Variety. "WWII and every war since then are simply aftershocks of that Great War. WWI was the birth of modern warfare.”

There’s no director set for No Man’s Land yet, as McQuarrie’s still busy scribbling, but he won’t do the job himself – he’s off to direct The Stanford Prison Experiment as soon as the ink is dry on the war script.