For his first foreign project, Kurosawa chose a story based on a "Life" magazine article. The Embassy Pictures action thriller, to be filmed in English and called simply "Runaway Train", would have been his first in color. But the language barrier proved a major problem, and the English version of the screenplay was not even finished by the time filming was to begin in autumn 1966. The shoot, which required snow, was moved to autumn 1967, then canceled in 1968. Almost two decades later, another foreign director working in Hollywood, Andrei Konchalovsky, finally made "Runaway Train" (1985), though from a new script loosely based on Kurosawa's.