Robert Pattinson's next project, Iraq thriller Mission: Blacklist, has found a director. Deadline is reporting that Swede Jesper Ganslandt will be calling the shots. Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire had been pencilled in but subsequently withdrew from the production.
Ganslandt has three Swedish films behind him, including 2012's Blondie, but Mission: Blacklist will be his English-language debut. The script, co-written by Band Of Brothers screenwriter Erik Jendresen, tells the story of Pattinson's Zero Dark Thirty-like quest for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003.
Set in the fallen dictatorship, the movie will tell the story of Staff Sgt. Maddox, a gun specialist interrogator charged with finding the bad guys. That's all of them: from Saddam and Tariq Aziz, right the way down to the funny propaganda man who used to tell the world that everything was under control even as American soldiers were rifling through his sock drawer.
But it's Saddam, of course, who's the big prize - the ace of spades in the Americans' deck - and Maddox is soon heading for his home town of Tikrit in the hope of smoking him out.
The film takes as its main source Mission: Black List #1, a non-fiction account written by Maddox himself (the '#1' part will presumably be having words with its agent), and should offer more interesting insights into Green Zone-era Iraq.
For R-Pattz (the 'R' now stands for 'recon'), Mission: Black List represents another movie away from teen franchise territory and into more demanding terrain. He also has Werner Herzog's T. E. Lawrence film **Queen Of The Desert **on his slate.
Image courtesy of Jeff Vespa/WireImage