Last June, word broke that The American** director Anton Corbijn was planning an adaptation of John Le Carre’s novel A Most Wanted Man. Now he’s found a star: Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Hoffman’s close to a deal to star in the film, which tracks a Chechen/Russian Muslim named Issa who arrives in Hamburg and gets caught up in the War On Terror. Hoffman will be playing the rogue chief of a German spy unit who tries to track down the man’s whereabouts and untangle the mystery surrounding him.
Edge Of Darkness co-writer Andrew Bovell is the man behind the script, which is based on Le Carre’s 2008 book. Le Carre, who spent time in Hamburg during his stint as a British agent, partly took the story from the life experiences of Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen living legally in German who was arrested in Pakistan in 2001 and packed off to Guantanamo Bay before winning release in 2006.
The various producers on the movie will be hunting for sales on the film at the European Film Market in Berlin. There’s no sign yet when it might start shooting, but Hoffman’s involvement is a good sign that it’ll go ahead this year.