After eight years away, Francis Ford Coppola will settle back into the director's chair for "Youth Without Youth," a WWII drama based on the novel by Romanian author Mircea Eliade.

Variety fills us in on the details: "Alexandra Maria Lara, Bruno Ganz and Marcel Iures will star in the pic, (scheduled) to begin production Oct. 3.

Story centers on a professor whose life changes after a cataclysmic incident during the dark years before WWII. Becoming a fugitive, he is pursued through far-flung locations including Romania, Switzerland, Malta and India."

Mr. Coppola adapted the book into screenplay, and seems pretty excited to get the project rolling.

"I was excited to discover, in this tale by Eliade, the key themes that I most hope to understand better: time, consciousness and the dreamlike basis of reality," Coppola said in a statement. "For me, it is indeed a return to the ambitions I had for work in cinema as a student."