"300" director Zack Snyder is sharpening his pencil for "The Illustrated Man," a project based on the Ray Bradbury collection of short stories.

The unrelated tales explore the nature of humankind and are linked by a storyteller with talking tattoos.

Some of the better-known stories include "The Veldt," about two parents who use an artificial nursery that re-creates the African savanna to placate their children but get locked inside it by the kids; "The Other Foot," in which Mars has been colonized by black people who want to create a system of segregation when they learn that a rocket filled with white travelers is arriving from Earth; and "Marionettes Inc.," in which a man attempts to escape his unhappy marriage by replacing himself with a robot to fool his wife, only to discover that his wife left a while ago and he had been living with a robot version of her.

The book, originally published in 1951, was the basis of a 1969 film that starred Rod Steiger in the title role.

The film is set up at Warner Bros., where Snyder is in preproduction on the comic-book adaptation "Watchmen."