Oliver Stone Set to Direct Edward Snowden Biopic

In a story that we could all see a mile away, The Guardian broke the news today that a biopic on NSA leaker Edward Snowden is officially in the works, and that Oliver Stone will be the one at the helm.  Stone picked up the rights to Luke Harding‘s book, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man, and is already working on a screenplay adaptation.

Of course, like everything in Hollywood, there’s another Snowden biopic in the works over at Sony, based on the book No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald.  Stone is trying to get this project underway quickly so his version can hit theaters before the other, so he plans to complete shooting by the end of the year.

Here’s the synopsis from the Harding book via Amazon:

In a tour de force of investigative journalism that reads like a spy novel, award-winning Guardian reporter Luke Harding tells Snowden’s astonishing story—from the day he left his glamorous girlfriend in Honolulu carrying a hard drive full of secrets, to the weeks of his secret-spilling in Hong Kong, to his battle for asylum and his exile in Moscow. For the first time, Harding brings together the many sources and strands of the story—touching on everything from concerns about domestic spying to the complicity of the tech sector—while also placing us in the room with Edward Snowden himself. The result is a gripping insider narrative—and a necessary and timely account of what is at stake for all of us in the new digital age.