Joseph Gordon-Levitt to play Edward Snowden In Oliver Stone Film

Here’s some international intel to pique your interest: Joseph Gordon-Levitt is set to play NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden for an upcoming biopic directed by Oliver Stone.

Fittingly, the news comes from The Guardian, whose journalist Luke Harding wrote one of the books on which Stone’s film will be based - The Snowden Files: The Inside Story Of The World’s Most Wanted Man.

The other book said to be propping up the film, due to begin filming in the early part of 2015, is Anatoly Kucherena’s Time of the Octopus, and given the source material and Stone's left-leaning political viewpoints, we can expect it to show Snowden in a fairly sympathetic light.

Stone, of course, is no stranger to taking on politically sensitive events (see: World Trade Centre) with knee-jerk cinema, or indeed White House fall-outs (see: W, JKF), although the casting of Levitt will clearly add some much needed cool to what might have otherwise been written off as a dry, paperwork-heavy affair.

The director and star, who are still in contract negotiations at the time of writing, will be hoping this project is off the ground well before No Place To Hide, another Snowden project, based on a book of the same name and produced by Bond stalwarts Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli.

Though with the tale of Snowden still playing out in the real world, the big screen can wait for now...

[Images: Rex, Youtube]