The Wikileaks movie finally has a writer. Rowan Joffe, who wrote 28 Weeks Later and The American and made his directorial debut with this year’s Brighton Rock, has been signed on to write the screenplay for the film, which is being co-produced by HBO and BBC.
According to Variety the film will focus on “the story of the database run by former hacker and internet activist Julian Assange and his operatives, whose mission is to collection and disseminate via the internet private, secret and classified information from anonymous sources.”
Charles Ferguson (Inside Job) will direct the film and Mark Boal (Hurt Locker) is on board to produce.
In March Steven Spielberg’s production company Dreamworks purchased the screen rights to two books on Wikileaks: Inside WikiLeaks: My Time With Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website by former WikiLeaks exec Daniel Domscheit-Berg and WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy by Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding.
A Wikileaks documentary is also in the works by the Oscar-winning Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guy in the Room, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer) with backing by Universal Pictures.
Now all the necessaries have been fleshed out, the question is who will play Julian Assange?
Title Image by Peter Macdiarmid via Getty
