Following the quirky Frank and the devastating Room, Lenny Abrahamson has settled on his next film. He'll direct The Grand Escape, adapted from the book by Neal Bascomb.
Bascomb's WWI history isn't yet published, but that hasn't stopped heated interest in the movie option. Film4 and Element Pictures ultimately won out. The story chronicles three daredevil fighter pilots captured and held as POWs at Holzminden, one of Germany's most infamous camps at that time. They go on to lead the First World War's greatest mass prison escape in July of 1918, and the narrative also follows their subesquent journey back to Britain via the Netherlands.
The story has been filmed twice before: once as the British war movie Who Goes Next? in 1938, and more recently as the National Geographic documentary The First Great Escape in 2014.
There's no screenwriter attached to Abrahamson's version yet, presumably since there's nothing to adapt until Bascomb hands in his manuscript. The author's immediate next book, The Winter Fortress, about the race to stop Hitler developing an atomic bomb, is out in May from Houghton Mifflin.