It looks as though Rise of the Planet of the Apes director Rupert Wyatt has settled on his next project.  Wyatt had been attached to helm the Apes sequel, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, but he and Fox apparently didn’t see eye-to-eye on the future of the franchise and he was subsequently replaced by Matt Reeves.  Now ScreenDaily reports that Wyatt will helm an adaptation of author Sebastian Faulks’ World War I novel Birdsong.  The story spans three generations and centers on a young Englishman who strikes up a love affair with a French woman and then enters the war.

Wyatt wrote the script and will direct the film with Alan Moloney set to produce through Parallel, alongside Embankment.  The director had previously been eyeing the KGB spy movie Londongrad with Michael Fassbender in the lead, but its unknown how that project has progressed since.  Hit the jump to read a synopsis for the novel Birdsong.

Here’s the synopsis for Birdsong:

Published to international critical and popular acclaim, this intensely romantic yet stunningly realistic novel spans three generations and the unimaginable gulf between the First World War and the present. As the young Englishman Stephen Wraysford passes through a tempestuous love affair with Isabelle Azaire in France and enters the dark, surreal world beneath the trenches of No Man's Land, Sebastian Faulks creates a world of fiction that is as tragic as A Farewell to Arms and as sensuous as The English Patient. Crafted from the ruins of war and the indestructibility of love, Birdsong is a novel that will be read and marveled at for years to come. [Amazon]