Edward Snowden Reportedly Will Be Played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Oliver Stone’s Biopic

Screen shot via The Guardian

Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt has agreed to take the lead role in “The Snowden Files,” a film about the National Security Agency whistle-blower directed by progressive filmmaker Oliver Stone, according to Variety. Although there’s no premiere date yet for the film, Truthdig Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer has a book on the topic of surveillance titled “They Know Everything About You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy” being published by Nation Books in late February. In Scheer’s book, inspired by Snowden’s leaks on the NSA’s data collection, the award-winning journalist argues that “the technology of surveillance … represents an existential threat to the liberation of the human spirit.”

To learn more about Scheer’s new book, read a short description here and find out more about Stone’s biopic below.

The Guardian:

Negotiations on the deal have not yet begun, but both men are keen on making it happen. Production on The Snowden Files, titled after the book by Guardian journalist Luke Harding, is due to begin late this year or in the early part of 2015.

The film, which Stone is writing and directing, now looks likely to be based on two books, Harding’s account – full title The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man – and Time of the Octopus by Snowden’s lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena. Stone recently picked up the screen rights to the latter tome after optioning Harding’s book in June…

Stone’s film could compete with a rival project titled No Place to Hide after the book by Glenn Greenwald, the freelance journalist to whom Snowden leaked thousands of classified documents in June 2013. That film is being brought to cinemas by James Bond producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, though the Stone version looks likely to arrive on the big screen first.

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Also read: “The Rendezvous,” the prologue excerpted from “The Snowden Files” by Luke Harding.

—Posted by Natasha Hakimi Zapata