Kathryn Bigelow rocked audiences and critics alike with the war film of the decade, The Hurt Locker. Can she repeat that magic again? Production Weekly reports that her next project will be Held By The Taliban. The film will be based on the five-part NY Times series by David Rhode, who was captured by the Taliban in Pakistan. While researching for a book in Pakistan Rhodes and two others were kidnapped and held for seven months and ten days before escaping. Check out an excerpt from the beginning of the story below.
The car’s engine roared as the gunman punched the accelerator and we crossed into the open Afghan desert. I was seated in the back between two Afghan colleagues who were accompanying me on a reporting trip when armed men surrounded our car and took us hostage.
Another gunman in the passenger seat turned and stared at us as he gripped his Kalashnikov rifle. No one spoke. I glanced at the bleak landscape outside — reddish soil and black boulders as far as the eye could see — and feared we would be dead within minutes.
It was last Nov. 10, and I had been headed to a meeting with a Taliban commander along with an Afghan journalist, Tahir Luddin, and our driver, Asad Mangal. The commander had invited us to interview him outside Kabul for reporting I was pursuing about Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Head over to NYTimes to read the rest there.
This is certainly a fascinating story, but I wonder what happened to Triple Frontier, a project Bigelow and Hurt Locker scribe Mark Boal were supposedly doing next. This project sounds equally as interesting though.
What do you think about Bigelow directing a film based on this story? Do you want her to venture to another genre?