Johnny Depp and Salma Hayek are to star in Serbian director Emir Kusturica’s biopic about Mexican revolutionary hero Pancho Villa.

• The movie to be titled Seven Friends of Pancho Villa and the Woman With Six Fingers, will start filming in 2011 due to Depp’s prior commitments, the report said Thursday.

• The film is based on the biographical novel The Friends of Pancho Villa, which recounts how Villa and his compadres had a great time fighting and robbing the rich, but also dancing, partying and making love.

Depp will act in Spanish in the Spanish-language feature that will be shot partly in Mexico, where Villa – an early 20th-century bandit who became a guerrilla fighter and a hero to the poor – is an iconic historical figure.