Zack Snyder, director of the comic book adaptations 300 and the soon-to-start-filming Watchmen, has already demonstrated a fondness for hand-drawn source material. According to Variety, his next project will take its inspiration from a different kind of illustration -- specifically, Ray Bradbury's 1951 collection of short stories, The Illustrated Man.

In the book, eighteen unrelated short stories are threaded together by the narrator's encounter with a drifter sporting animated, storytelling tattoos he claims to have been given by a woman from the future. This isn't the first time The Illustrated Man has been given the film treatment -- in 1969, Rod Steiger starred in the title role -- but Variety refers to the new project as a "redo," not a remake, and in any case, the original film only adapted three of the book's stories; screenwriter Alex Tse could conceivably deliver what amounts to an entirely new movie.

No target release is mentioned for the project, but Snyder -- who is producing the film in conjunction with Di Novi Pictures and Frank Darabont -- will be tied up with Watchmen for the foreseeable future, so we shouldn't expect to see anything for awhile yet.

Source: Variety