PATRIOT GAMES Director Phillip Noyce To Helm a Secret Iraq Mission Thriller Titled ALIVE DAY
Phillip Noyce, the director behind Patriot Day, Clear and Present Danger, Salt, and The Giver, is set to helm a secret Iraq mission thriller titled Alive Day. The film will be an adaptation of Samuel Hill’s military taskforce novel Six Days to Zeus: Alive Day.
Alive Day follows Hill’s true story as he led a unit comprised of seven men from the Navy Seals, Green Berets, Army Rangers and Marine Recon. They were “conducting secret surveillance during the Saddam Hussein regime. The unit operated in the Iraqi desert near the Jordanian border in 2003. The name of their unit was so secretive that it changed every 30 days, and they would enter Baghdad, sometimes disguised in burkas or hiding in sanitary trucks. However, a horrific explosion kills all the unit’s members except Chief, who barely survives.” Hill is Chief in the story.
Kathleen McLaughlin, co-producer of The Quiet American, is writing the screenplay and when talking to Deadline about the script, Noyce said it’s “part American Sniper, part Born on the Fourth of July, part Coming Home, and part Deer Hunter, but different to all of them in that it has an Agatha Christie whodunit sensibility to it. And that is the accused, Chief, legitimately doesn’t know if he’s the perpetrator of slaughtering his own men. What really happened and what was unearthed is an unbelievable detective story involving the FBI, and the work that they were doing secretly for the Jordanian government.”
It’s explained that after the mission, “Chief found himself a wheelchair-bound vet, told by doctors that he would never walk, and wound up homeless for a period, living in a park in North Carolina. However, his fate ultimately changed in an extraordinary way through a visitor to the park. Soonafter their encounter, Chief was able to walk again thanks to a revolutionary medical technology. He wound up using writing as a therapy to discover the truth of what happened to him in Iraq, and wrote Zeus.'“
When talking about what drew him to the story, Noyce said, “I’ve previously made reality based films with Harrison Ford such as Clear and Present Danger and larger than life extreme action thrillers like Salt with Angelina Jolie. In retelling one man’s remarkable and uplifting real story, Kathleen McLaughlin’s screenplay for Alive Day combines seemingly disparate elements in ways that hopefully all at once reinvent the thriller, war and mystery film genres.”
This certainly sounds like an incredible story. I love these kinds of stories so I’m looking forward to seeing how this movie turns out. I’ll probably end up reading the book before the movie comes out. Here’s the description from the book:
This book is a fictional account of a real soldier's life. Approved by the Pentagon Pre-Publication Security Review process, the names, dates, places and military tactics have been changed to protect classified information. Although every day was filled with highly classified missions and Special Compartmented Intelligence (SCI), the heart of this story has nothing to do with classified information. This book is not a kiss and tell, but instead a book about the lessons in life we all must learn and about the often times expensive tuition we must pay. Because in the end, life is about what you do to other people.
This book is dedicated to the men and women who work in the shadows to prosecute U.S. Foreign Policy with a ferocious level of intent. These are the men and women of "Tier One Intelligence Support Activity", the soldiers who do the endless intelligence research and surveillance so SEAL Teams, Delta Force and ODA Teams can go to war and come home successful. This story is about some of those soldiers and the consequences of the decisions they made to take on some of the most dangerous and highly classified operations since the Global War on Terror was announced.
Noyce hopes to start production on Alive Day once it’s safe to do so.