Paul Greengrass making a movie about escaping under the Berlin Wall

By Dan Selcke | October 27, 2014 | 9:35pm

Aux Features Film

Fresh off the financial and critical success of Captain Phillips, Paul Greengrass will head a bit further into the past to direct The Tunnels, an escape drama about a group of West Germans who try to smuggle their loved ones into East Berlin prior to the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall. Along the way, the group receives help from American news networks willing to fund their escape. The Tunnels will be based on a book proposal by Greg Mitchell, a nonfiction author who’s actually completed several books on subjects like WikiLeaks and the dropping of the atomic bomb.

The material sounds like a good fit for Greengrass, who’s shown a penchant for dramatizing the recent past in films like United 93 and Green Zone. However, the director also has a penchant for committing to more than one project at a time, so it’s anybody’s guess as to whether he’ll do this one before the movie about the bombing of the 1996 Olympic Games, the drama about a double-agent inside of Al Qaeda, the next installment in the Bourne franchise, or whatever else catches his eye before he goes to bed tonight.