Snow White and the Huntsman's Rupert Sanders is to direct a big budget epic biopic of Napoleon, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Sanders, a former commercials director who made his big screen debut with the Kristen Stewart fantasy blockbuster, will work from a screenplay by Jeremy Doner of the US version of TV crime drama The Killing. While little is known about the storyline, the film will reportedly take a "Scarface" approach to the French revolutionary leader.

Napoleon has been depicted dozens of times on the big screen and was also the subject of a famously unfilmed Stanley Kubrick project in the 1970s. Steven Spielberg revealed in March that he has begun work on a TV series based on that screenplay in conjunction with the late film-maker's family.

Kubrick is said to have abandoned his attempt at a biopic after Hollywood studios refused to fund it in the wake of the failure in 1970 of the Sergei Bondarchuk-directed Waterloo. The film-maker reputedly engaged in meticulous research for his planned film, with Oskar Werner and Audrey Hepburn set for the leading roles. "It's impossible to tell you what I'm going to do except to say that I expect to make the best movie ever made," he wrote to studio executives in 1971.

Studio Warner Bros apparently has no such qualms about the version planned by Sanders.