Oliver Stone bolsters Edward Snowden project with Octopus

The partners have acquired films rights to the novel Time Of The Octopus, an as-yet-unpublished fictionalised story by Snowden’s Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena that appears to borrow heavily from real events.

Stone plans to use Kucherena’s novel alongside Luke Harding’s book, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story Of The World’s Most Wanted Man as he prepares the untitled Snowden feature, set to shoot before the end of the year.

Stone announced his involvement in a Snowden project last week, in what has become a rival project to Eon producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli’s Glenn Greenwald adaptation No Place To Hide.

Time Of The Octopus centres on a US whistleblower who flees to Russia where he meets a Russian lawyer and looks back on his life.

“Anatoly has written a grand inquisitor-style Russian novel weighing the soul of his fictional whistleblower, Joshua Cold, against the gravity of a 1984 tyranny that has achieved global proportions,” said Stone. “His meditations on the meaning of totalitarian power in the 21st century make for a chilling, prescient horror story.”

Kucherena added: “The more I engaged in the Edward Snowden case, the more I was impressed by his story. To understand Edward and his actions, I had to tune to his wavelength and try to balance between the rational and intuitive perception of his world.

“Having experienced these incredible sensations, I realised that I had to write about them, but only in the form of a novel that would not claim any sophisticated philosophical conclusions.”