Kathryn Bigelow Might Take on the Bergdahl Movie

Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Baol, the team behind Zero Dark Thirty, want to make another, probably controversial movie about recent U.S. involvement in the Middle East: the story of Bowe Bergdahl.

Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Baol, the team behind Zero Dark Thirty, want to make another, probably controversial movie about recent U.S. involvement in the Middle East: the story of Bowe Bergdahl.

Mike Fleming Jr. at Deadline reports that Bigelow and Bowe are in the "early stage planning" phase of the project, which they had apparently been looking into before the recent news of Bergdahl's release from the Taliban in exchange for a prisoner swap. Fleming writes: "I’m not exactly sure what form the movie will take, but I’ve heard that the filmmakers quietly have been tracking the story for several years with a possible movie in mind. "

The story does seem like a perfect fit for Bigelow and Bowe, who proved with ZDT and The Hurt Locker that they are arguably the best team to document the U.S.'s involvement in the Middle East in a narrative format. But a project like this seems to be courting the same controversy that Zero Dark Thirty did, and the Bergdahl story is already a more contentious issue than the killing of Osama bin Laden. Part of what felled Zero Dark Thirty, for some, was that it seemed like Bigelow and Bowe were writing history in a journalistic manner, which became a problem when the film was criticized for its depiction of how torture factored into the hunt for bin Laden.

Bigelow and Boal might have competition for the project though: Fleming also reports that Fox Searchlight has acquired Michael Hastings' Rolling Stone article about Bergdahl: America's Last Prisoner of War.