Tornatore will develop the script for "The Lady" with Japanese producer Naofumi Okamoto for a production to begin later this year. Okamoto is producing the project alongside Avi Arad and Steven Paul and Benedict Carver of L.A.---based Crystal Sky Pictures.

Okamoto is one of few foreigners to have met with Suu Kyi since her arrest 17 years ago by Burma's military junta. After securing her permission to develop a movie based on her life, he asked Tornatore to direct because of the latter's affinity for female characters.

Suu Kyi is the leader of the pro-democracy movement in Burma and an advocate of nonviolent resistance. The daughter of the general who negotiated Burmese independence from Britain after WWII, she was educated at Oxford University and married an English scholar before returning to her homeland in 1988. Her party won elections in 1990, but she was prevented from taking power by the country's ruling junta.

She has spent much of the past 17 years under house arrest and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1991. When her husband was diagnosed with cancer in 1997, the Burmese government denied him entry visa to visit his wife. Suu Kyi was told she could leave to see him, but only on condition that she never return. She chose to stay in Burma and never saw her husband again before his death in 1999. She remains separated from her two sons, who live in England.

For Arad, best known for movies based on Marvel Comics superheroes such as Spider-Man and X-Men, the project is a departure, though he plans "The Lady" to be a movie with broadest audience appeal.

"The Lady" will span the time from Suu Kyi's return to Burma in 1988, when she was 43, to the present day. The movie will be in English, the language in which Suu Kyi was educated and which she speaks at home. No cast is yet attached.

Tornatore, best known for his 1988 Oscar-winning movie "Cinema Paradiso," recently directed "The Unknown Woman," which is Italy's official entry for the foreign-lnaguage Oscar and is set for U.S. release in March.