Joseph Gordon-Levitt will be on our screens later next year playing real-life high-wire walker Philippe Petit in The Walk. And he’s seriously considering another based-on-reality role for Oliver Stone, reportedly circling the lead in the director’s Edward Snowden film.
Stone and producer Moritz Borman have bought up two prime sources for their film, Time Of The Octopus, a novel by Snowden’s Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena, giving him access to the story of the whistle blower who reluctantly sought asylum in Russia and had to wait to see if the country would grant it. The filmmakers also have the option on Guardian journalist Luke Hardin’s book The Snowden Files: The Inside Story Of The World’s Most Wanted Man.
Pitched as a thriller, Stone’s film will chart the experiences of Snowden, the whistleblowing National Security Agency contractor who began leaking classified documents to former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald in June 2013. Snowden, currently stuck in Russia after the US cancelled his passport, has become a polarizing figure between those – such as the director himself – who consider him a patriotic hero, and those who feel he’s a traitor.
With a December start date pencilled in for shooting to kick off in Munich, Stone clearly wants to get out ahead of any competition, including Bond producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, who have their own project bubbling away based on Greenwald’s own upcoming book.
The risk will be in tackling a story that has still to fully crystalize and which is so recent that it could end up inspiring as much antipathy as interest, a fate that partly befell Julian Assange story** The Fifth Estate**.
As for Robert Zemeckis' The Walk, that hits our cinemas on October 2, 2015.