A few years back, Neil Burger was attached to direct an adaptation of Olen Steinhauser’s novel All The Old Knives, but the project went off the radar with no progression.
It is now popping back up, this time with a pair of major names in Kate Winslet and Idris Elba being seriously looked at for roles.
Since no details of the film are known, below is a brief synopsis of the novel.
Six years ago in Vienna, terrorists took over a hundred hostages, and the rescue attempt went terribly wrong. The CIA’s Vienna station gathered intel during those tense hours, assimilating facts from the ground and from an agent on the inside. So when it all went wrong, the question had to be asked: Had their agent been compromised, and how?
Two of the CIA’s case officers in Vienna, Henry Pelham and Celia Harrison, were lovers at the time, and on the night of the hostage crisis Celia decided she’d had enough. She left the agency, married and had children, and now lives in idyllic Carmel-by-the-Sea. Henry is still a case officer in Vienna, and has traveled to California to see her one more time, to relive the past, maybe, or to put it behind him once and for all.
But neither of them can forget that long-ago question: Had their agent been compromised? If so, how? Each also wonders what role tonight’s dinner companion might have played in the way the tragedy unfolded six years ago.
It is also being reported that neither star will sign on unless the other one does. If that should happen, production should begin soon.