Tom Cruise to Fight Against Civil War

By Stephen M. Silverman

11/13/2001 at 12:00 PM EST

Tom Cruise, 39, will star in the upcoming American Civil War film "Cold Mountain," based on the 1997 novel by Charles Frazier, producer Sydney Pollack told Reuters on Tuesday. The director will be Anthony Minghella ("The English Patient"). "We're in deep preparation for that at the moment," Pollack, 67, said in Australia, where he is doing post-production work on "The Quiet American," based on Graham Greene's classic novel set in Indochina. The veteran moviemaker ("Out of Africa," "The Way We Were") said that he hopes to being principal photography on "Mountain" in June. Crews are currently scouting locations in North Carolina and Canada. When the book was first published, PEOPLE, in its review, summed it up by saying, "A wounded Confederate soldier heads home to the woman he left behind. His odyssey -- and the parallel ordeal of the sweetheart who waits for him -- drives this haunting first novel." The story, sort of a Civil War take on Homer's "The Odyssey," is filled with eccentric characters and concerns a man simply called Inman, a veteran of battles in Petersburg and Fredericksburg. As he recovers in a Confederate hospital, he decides that he has endured enough of the pointless slaughter and walks out, heading across the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina toward Cold Mountain, where he hopes to reclaim his spiritual homeland and Ada, the woman he loves. No word yet on the casting of Ada.