EXCLUSIVE: Colin Firth is in talks to board Thomas Vinterberg‘s submarine pic Kursk opposite Matthias Schoenaerts. The fact-based survival drama, which starts production this fall, has Saving Private Ryan scribe Robert Rodat adapting the Robert Moore book A Time To Die. The film centers on the true story of the Kursk, a nuclear-powered Russian submarine that sank during a training exercise in the Barents Sea in 2000. Twenty-three sailors survive the crash and desperately wait for help to arrive while their oxygen runs out minute-by-minute.
Firth, credited as a producer on Jeff Nichols’ well-received Loving, has a number of big films in the pipelines, no pun intended. The actor stars in James Marsh’s biopic charting yachtsman Donald Crowhurst’s disastrous attempt to win the 1968 Golden Globe Race that ends up with him creating a fabricated account of traveling the world alone by sea. He also has sequels Bridget Jones’s Baby and Kingsman: The Golden Circle as well as Michael Grandage’s Genius opposite Jude Law and Nicole Kidman, about the real-life friendship that develops between the editor Maxwell Perkins (Firth) and author Thomas Wolfe (Law).
This becomes another greenlighted movie for EuropaCorp to be distributed through its new pipeline RED. EuropaCorp founder Luc Besson has the company’s biggest picture in production right now in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, a sci-fi epic that stars Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne and an eclectic supporting cast that includes Rihanna, John Goodman, Ethan Hawke, Clive Owen, Rutger Hauer and Herbie Hancock.
Colin Firth is repped by CAA and Independent Talent Group.
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