Joseph Gordon-Levitt to play Edward Snowden in Oliver Stone film
Don Jon star will play former NSA contractor who blew the whistle on the US government’s mass surveillance programmes, the film’s backers said.
Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt will play Edward Snowden in a film directed by Oliver Stone about the former National Security Agency contractor who blew the whistle on the US government’s mass surveillance programmes, the film’s backers said on Monday.
Stone, who won best director Oscars for and , has written the screenplay based on two books – by Luke Harding and by Anatoly Kucherena.
The still untitled film goes into production in Munich in January, said independent studio Open Road Films and production and financing company Endgame Entertainment.
Producer Moritz Borman said that he and Stone chose Open Road and Endgame because “this film needs an independent in the true sense, where political pressures will not come into play.”
Snowden leaked tens of thousands of classified intelligence documents to the media last year and sparked a firestorm over the NSA’s gathering of data from the internet activities and phones of millions of ordinary Americans and dozens of world leaders.
The recently released documentary by Laura Poitras chronicles how the former NSA contractor decided to leak the documents and the global repercussions of that act.
