Following their major critical and commercial success with Captain Phillips, director Paul Greengrass and producer Scott Rudin are once again set to collaborate on a true-life political thriller. Changing the parameters this time, however, they're turning their attention to terrorism rather than piracy and a spy rather than an Everyman. Agent Storm, adapted from a bestselling book, is the story of Morten Storm, a Danish former jihadist recruited by the CIA.
Agent Storm: My Life Inside Al-Qaeda (written by Storm himself, with Paul Cruickshank and Tim Lister) is one of those non-fiction tomes that reads like a thriller. Storm was an off-the-rails teenager into crime and biker gangs, who then converted to Islam. His journey led him from Denmark to Yemen where he became a protege and close confidant of the American-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. But a twist in the tale saw him become disillusioned with his new cause. Recruited by the CIA, MI6 and Danish intelligence agency PET, the mission he chose to accept was to become a double agent and bring down his former mentor from inside al-Awlaki's own circle.
The book has been snapped up by Sony, and Greengrass and Rudin are now developing the film for Greengrass to direct. There's no screenwriter attached yet, but we'd suggest Captain Phillips' Billy Ray would not be an outlandish bet. How soon the project might go before cameras is another matter though, since Greengrass currently has several plates spinning. He's linked to Stephen King's The Stand; the long-gestating Martin Luther King saga Memphis; and most recently, the cyber-thriller The Director, based on the novel by Body Of Lies author David Ignatius.
Agent Storm was published in the UK by Viking earlier this month, and is available in hardcover and digitally.