Colin Farrell, Ed Harris, Jim Sturgess and Saoirse Ronan are all in final discussions to star for Peter Weir in The Way Back, a fact-based story of a group of soldiers who engineered a grueling escape from a Siberian gulag in 1942.

I love Weir’s style of making grueling movies. They are very calming with a relentless air of suspense and sorrow.

Weir wrote the script, based on the memoir by Slavomir Rawicz called “The Long Way.”

Farrell plays a tough, tattooed Russian; Harris an American; and Sturgess portrays a young Polish inmate. Ronan will play a Russian on the run who meets up with the fugitives.

Production is set to begin in March in Bulgaria. This is Weir’s next film since he directed 2003′s Master and Commander.