Mike Newell’s an interesting guy, mixing big studio projects with a variety of more personal projects, so that, for example, he went from making Harry Potter 4 to an adaptation of Love In The Time Of Cholera. Now he’s planning to move from the epic Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time to a far more contentious subject.
Variety reports that he’s planning a movie about former KGB spy, Alexander Litvinenko. Newell will write and direct the film, based on the book, The Terminal Spy, by Alan Cowell. Litvinenko, of course, hit the headlines when it emerged he’d been poisoned in 2006 with the radioactive substance, polonium-210. Before dying, he accused Vladimir Putin of being behind his murder. While numerous theories have sprung up about exactly what happened, Litvinenko was no doubt a major critic of Russia, accusing the government of staging bombings to bring Putin to power. Long before he died, there was talk of assasination plots, and his murder was one of the strangest things to have happened in the Cold War era.
Michael Mann was also planning a film about Litvinenko, but that seems to have stalled recently (possibly because the truth about what he accused Russia of and his murder is so elusive), so now it’s Newell’s turn to have a go.