If you could cull your cast from Star Wars, Avengers, Game Of Thrones, The Silence Of The Lambs and Sherlock, you'd be a fool not to try. Fortunately for director Justin Chadwick, he has Harrison Ford, Martin Freeman, Anthony Hopkins, Paul Bettany and Natalie Dormer lined up for based-on-truth espionage thriller Official Secrets.
Chadwick, who most recently had Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom in cinemas, is preparing to shoot Sara and Gregory Bernstein's adaptation of the book The Spy Who Tried To Stop A War: Katharine Gun And The Secret Plot To Sanction The Iraq Invasion. It focuses on Gunn (Dormer), a young British intelligence officer who was arrested when she leaked classified information to Observer reporter Martin Bright (Bettany), alleging that America's National Security Agency was illegally trying to pressure the UN security council into approving the resolution to fight Iraq in 2003. But when Bright tries to have her freed, they learn just how far people will go to stop such leaks in future.
Freeman is on board to play the Observer's foreign affairs editor, while the cast's two big guns, Ford and Hopkins will be a CIA agent and a retired British general respectively. Chadwick is gearing up to start shooting in May and the project will be offered to buyers at the European Film Market in Berlin, which kicks off on 11 February. We have a feeling this one will be a hot property...