A nifty behind-the-scenes teaser trailer was released last week for Valkyrie, openly gay director extraordinaire Bryan Singer's upcoming World War II epic, due out next summer. Valkyrie is based on a true story and revolves around the German plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Tom Cruise stars as Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, with Bill Nighy, Terence Stamp, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Wilkinson, Eddie Izzard, and Stephen Fry rounding out the rest of the cast. Early footage looks promising and I've got high hopes for the film, as I've loved just about everything Singer's done, including the vastly underrated Superman Returns.

Singer's filmography is fascinating in that he obviously has a predilection toward films with themes he can relate to; growing up both Jewish and gay has obviously influenced him a great deal. After all, few filmmakers would have opened a big budget superhero film in a Nazi concentration camp or included a "coming out" scene, as he did in X-Men and X2, respectively.

It will be interesting to see how Singer handles a film more explicitly about these themes when he tackles the Harvey Milk biography, The Mayor of Castro Street, which Singer is still (as far as I know) attached to direct, before he moves on to the Superman sequel. That film will be in competition with Gus Van Sant (another openly gay director) and his, as yet untitled, Harvey Milk project, already in pre-production.

UPDATE: A higher quality version of the teaser has been uploaded to the Apple website, in glorious Quicktime.