Danny Huston will direct “Becoming Colette,” about...

Danny Huston will direct “Becoming Colette,” about the early years of the celebrated French novelist who wrote perceptively of the relationships between men and women. Mathilda May stars as the young and precocious Colette, and Klaus Maria Brandauer will play her first husband, Henri Gauthier-Villars, a Paris editor-publisher known as Willy. Huston’s wife, Virginia Madsen, will play Polaire, an entertainer who was both mistress and protege to Willy, and Jean-Pierre Aumont plays Colette’s father. The Peer Oppenheimer production gets underway Nov. 5 in Berlin and Bordeaux, France. Ruth Graham wrote the script.

Francis Ford Coppola and Fred Fuchs will executive produce “Wind,” a fictional account of an America’s Cup race to shoot in January under the direction of Carroll Ballard. The script was written by Kim Livingston and Roger Vaught, two professional sailers and journalists. The film, produced by Mata Yamamoto and Tom Ruddy, will probably be filmed off Southern California and Australia.

David Price, the son of Columbia Pictures Chairman Frank Price, makes his feature directorial debut with Arrowhead Entertainment’s “Son of Darkness: To Die For II,” a sequel to last year’s contemporary update of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” Leslie King’s script concerns the offspring of the previous film’s romantic liaison, a child who is half undead. Jay Underwood joins returning actors Steve Bond, Scott Jacoby, Remy O’Neill and Amanda Wyss in the film produced by Peter Foster and executive produced by Greg H. Sims and Lee Caplin. Rolling Nov. 5, the film is believed to be the first production to shoot entirely in the Lake Arrowhead area since Douglas Sirk’s “Magnificent Obsession” (1954).

Diana Scarwid, an Oscar nominee in 1980 for “Inside Moves” who returned to Savannah, Ga., to raise a family, has agreed to star in River Road Productions’ “Not Under My Roof,” a romantic comedy that will shoot in six weeks in the resort community of Tybee Island, Ga. Produced by Harry Middleton and written and directed by Lance Smith, the story concerns two high schoolers whose passionate relationship cools when his divorced mom and her divorced dad start dating. Baltimore Orioles pitcher Jeff Ballard also has a small part.

Also rolling in the south is IRS Media’s untitled action-drama about a small-town sheriff who must confront his past when two L.A. cops arrive to track down dangerous criminals. Bill Paxton stars as the sheriff, Cynda Williams (the singer in Spike Lee’s “Mo’ Better Blues”) is one of the criminals and Jim Meltzer plays one of the cops. Carl Franklin directs the Billy Bob Thornton-Tom Epperson script for producers Jessie Beaton and Ben Myron. Miles A. Copeland and Paul Colichman executive produce. Shooting is getting underway this week in Brinkley, Ark.