Never one to shy away from a hot-button topic when he can make a drama about it, Oliver Stone is busy putting together a film about the changing fortunes of American secrecy whistle-blower Edward Snowden. He has Joseph Gordon-Levitt now aboard to play the man himself and Shailene Woodley has entered talks to play Snowden’s girlfriend{
Stone’s film, which adapts both Luke Harding’s book The Snowden Files: The Inside Story Of The World’s Most Wanted Man and the novel written by Snowden’s lawyer Anatoly Kucherena called Time Of The Octopus, doesn’t have a name at the moment. But the plot will follow his shift from Hawaii to Hong Kong, his meeting with documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (who has shot her own account of the event, Citizenfour) and Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald where he handed over copious documents. From there, it will track his flight to Moscow where he sought asylum and spent time living in diplomatic limbo at the airport.
The director is setting the film up now ready to shoot this coming January in Germany. Woodley, who found dual success this year with Divergent and The Fault In Our Stars, will next be seen in the former’s sequel, Insurgent (due March 20) and Gregg Araki’s White Bird In A Blizzard, which arrives a week earlier on March 13.