Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Chloe Grace Moretz have signed on to star as cult leader Jim Jones and Jonestown survivor Deborah Layton respectively in the psychological thriller feature “White Night” for FilmNation Entertainment and Archer Grey.
Jones was a Christian minister and mass murderer who set up his own remote jungle commune in Jonestown, Guyana. He attracted a thousand of followers to live there with him, calling it a ‘socialist paradise free from the oppression of the United States government’.
When U.S. Democrat rep Leo Ryan investigated of his own volition in 1978, he and several followers trying to flee with him were gunned down whilst boarding a return flight. Soon after Jones ordered and likely coerced a mass murder-suicide that claimed the lives of 918 commune members, 304 of them children, via cyanide-laced Flavor Aid.
Anne Sewitsky (“A Very British Scandal”) will direct this adaptation of Layton’s best-selling memoir “Seductive Poison” from a script by William Wheeler (“Ghost in the Shell”). Shooting will begin this spring.
The project is separate from the Scott Rosenberg-penned MGM film which has Leonardo DiCaprio signed on to play Jim Jones.
Source: THR
