Famed Hollywood director Oliver Stone has acquired the rights to a fictitious novel written by one of Edward Snowden’s lawyers with plans to use it as the basis for an upcoming movie on the whistleblower, weekly entertainment magazine Variety reported last week.
“Time of the Octopus,” expected to be published later this year, was written by Anatoly Kucherena and tells the tale of American whistleblower Joshua Cold as he is stuck in a Moscow airport for three weeks.
The fictitious account closely resembles that of Snowden, who was briefly stuck in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport last year as he was en route to Latin America from Hong Kong. The whistleblower became stuck in the airport after U.S. officials suspended his passport.
Kucherena was retained by Snowden during his time in limbo at Sheremetyveo. Snowden has since been living in Moscow under temporary political asylum, and Kucherena is said to be one of the few people to have ongoing access to Snowden during his time in Russia.
Stone is expected to combine the fictitious account laid out in “Time of the Octopus” along with that found in the non-fiction book “The Snowden Files,” an account written by journalist Luke Harding of Snowden’s plight after leaking thousands of classified documents detailing clandestine National Security Agency programs to reporters.
The decision to combine the stories means Stone’s adaptation, set to start filming later this year, will be less of a documentary of Snowden’s life post-whistleblower and more an invention of Hollywood imagination.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald confirmed last month that his account of the Snowden affair, detailed in his book “No Place to Hide,” will also hit the silver screen. Greenwald, who published the first set of stories based on the documents provided by Snowden, sold the rights to his film to producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli.
Matthew Keys is a contributing journalist for TheBlot Magazine.
