He made a splash last year with the thriller Elite Squad, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival – and it hasn’t taken long for Hollywood to find a project for Jose Padilha’s particular talents.
The Brazilian director has signed to direct the Robert Ludlum adaptation, The Sigma Protocol, for Universal, with shooting set to start in the summer.
Based on Ludlum’s final completed novel, The Sigma Protocol has echoes of the Bourne franchise – it’s about a man on the run from a shadowy and hugely powerful organisation, for one thing. But the original Ludlum novel, first published posthumously in 2001, involved a Nazi conspiracy and a sinister castle high in the Alps, and all sorts of far-fetched derring-do.
The movie version will instead take place in the here and now, transforming its hero, Ben Hartman, into a Wall Street hot-shot who specialises in the economy of ‘black swan events’ – events that are so large, rare and unforeseen that they dominate history (like World War I, or 9/11).
Matt Holloway and Art Marcum, writers of Iron Man, are currently beavering away on the script, which will beat Warner Bros’ **The Willing Patriot **and Plan B’s drug movie, Marching Powder, to become Padilha’s first English-language project.