Oliver Stone and Moritz Borman have added more source material to their upcoming Edward Snowden feature.

The partners have acquired films rights to the novel Time Of The Octopus, an as-yet-unpublished fictionalised story by Snowden’s Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena that appears to borrow heavily from real events.

Stone plans to use Kucherena’s novel alongside Luke Harding’s book, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story Of The World’s Most Wanted Man as he prepares the untitled Snowden feature, set to shoot before the end of the year.

Stone announced his involvement in a Snowden project last week, in what has become a rival project to Eon producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli’s Glenn Greenwald adaptation No Place To Hide.

Time Of The Octopus centres on a US whistleblower who flees to Russia where he meets a Russian lawyer and looks back on his life.

“Anatoly has written a grand inquisitor-style Russian novel weighing the soul of his fictional whistleblower, Joshua Cold, against the gravity of a 1984 tyranny that has achieved global proportions,” said Stone. “His meditations on the meaning of totalitarian power in the 21st century make for a chilling, prescient horror story.”

Kucherena added: “The more I engaged in the Edward Snowden case, the more I was impressed by his story. To understand Edward and his actions, I had to tune to his wavelength and try to balance between the rational and intuitive perception of his world.

“Having experienced these incredible sensations, I realised that I had to write about them, but only in the form of a novel that would not claim any sophisticated philosophical conclusions.”