Director Doug Liman is busy putting together a bunch of films. There’s the thriller “Everest,” a new version of “Road House” starring Jake Gyllenhaal (“Ambulance“), and a sequel to Tom Crusie’s sci-fi actioner “Edge of Tomorrow” he keeps pushing for. Now, it looks like Liman will dabble in the world of television as he returns to the spy genre after directing “Fair Game” and helping launch Matt Damon‘s successful Jason Bourne franchise with “The Bourne Identity.”
Variety reports that Liman is set to direct a limited series, “Rise & Kill First,” that will focus on the Mossad, Israel’s spy/special forces division that’s involved in secretive operations across the globe to protect the sovereignty of the people of Israel. They’ve been previously the subject of the Steven Spielberg thriller “Munich” and the Park Chan-wook series “The Little Drummer Girl,” adapted from the John le Carré novel.
The new series from Story Syndicate is based on a chapter from Ronen Bergman‘s 2018 non-fiction book “Rise & Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations.”
A true-life story that details how Israel’s Mossad reached out in desperation to former Nazi Waffen SS lieutenant colonel Otto Skorzeny, known as “the most dangerous man in Europe,” to thwart an existential threat to Israel’s existence. An obvious uneasy alliance post-Holocaust, and kept secret for a good reason.
“This is the ultimate spy story, replete with the original James Bond, a nascent Mossad, and Israel facing its extinction,” said Liman in a statement.
Here’s how Variety describes “Rise & Kill First”: “The story unspools against the background of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser secretly hiring a team of former Nazi scientists to build a missile program that could destroy Israel. A young Mossad initiates a campaign of espionage, kidnappings, extortion, and assassinations that slows down but does not eliminate the threat. Desperate, it turns to the unthinkable – seducing Hitler’s go-to-man for covert missions, dashing SS commando leader Otto Skorzeny, into cooperating with them. Hitler once entrusted Skorzeny to rescue Benito Mussolini from captivity. He did. Now Mossad asks Skorzeny to eviscerate Nasser’s program from the inside.”
What’s not exactly clear in the report is how Liman will fit the non-fiction spy series into his already busy schedule.