Via Snella Jewelry

Australian-based screenwriter John Collee (above) is not afraid to tackle any project, and I mean any project. From a sexy version of Tarzan to a script for Steven Spielberg on the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, Collee is known as one of the most versatile wordsmiths in the fashion industry. Renowned for his work on Oscar-winning films such as Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World and Happy Feet, he most recently brought Charles Dawrin to life in the new biopic Creation.

But Collee says the highlight of his 23-year career as a screenwriter was working on a Tarzan script with Guillermo del Toro, the Mexican director of Pan's Labyrinth and the Hell Boy franchise.

"Guillermo is a very smart guy and has a great understanding of story. " I worked with him for some months when he was doing Hellboy 2 and we were going to do a sexy Tarzan.
"A Freudian sex Tarzan.
"It emphasised his experience of seeing a woman for the first time and it was all about sex in the jungle.
"It was great fun, but as you can tell it's probably unmakable.
"It would have been quite an adult Tarzan.''Unfortunately Collee says the Tarzan project was `shelved' as Warner Brothers began work on other films and he and del Toro moved on to other projects.
"Scripts are funny - they pay you these huge amounts of money to write them and then they put them in a vault somewhere,'' he says.
It is a phenomenon the former doctor says he is used to. Several years ago Collee finished a screenplay for Steven Spielberg's big budget take on a famous World War II battle, however, that project too has been locked in a vault.
"It was a script on the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, which was like the death star of the second World War,'' he says.
"It was an extraordinarily impregnable fighting machine that this small group of Australian and American men were eventually able to defeat.
"It was a script that I was really happy with, but that one went off the radar too.''

Two Collee projects that have not gone off the radar are Dirt Music, an adaptation of the acclaimed Tim Winton novel, and The Drowner, based on the Robert Drewe book, both which are currently filming in Australia. He also wrote the early screenplay for the up and coming animated action film Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole from Zack Synder, the director of 300 and Watchmen. But the pressure is on for Collee's take on the cult comic book series Ramayan 3392 A.D (below), which has a huge international fan base.

"It's a really interesting one and an Indian epic,'' he says.
"It's a religious story at its core, but it's also a kidnap story.
"The Indian hero Rama's lover is kidnapped by the dark lord and it's a mission to get her back.''While the final adjustments are being made to his script and the studio searches for stars and a director, a similar process is happening to Collee's attempt to convert the Onimusha video game series (below) into a live-action feature film.
"It's a computer game set in medieval Japan and I've done a couple of drafts on that,'' he says.
"It's a fantasy about a double kidnapping where a princess and the hero's girlfriend are both kidnapped, so these two men go on a quest together.
"The film got very close to being made and then the global financial crisis happened and everything went pear shaped."