For a while there, “White Lies” looked like one of those late-career films destined to live forever in development hell. But now it appears Oliver Stone is finally getting the thing off the ground. Deadline reports the filmmaker is underway on “White Lies,” his first narrative feature since “Snowden,” with Josh Hartnett now in the lead role on a project that had previously been associated with Benicio del Toro.
The film sounds more intimate than the political thing Stone is usually associated with. “White Lies” follows a man shaped by his parents’ divorce who winds up replaying those same fractures in his own marriage and with his troubled son. Trapped in that cycle, he heads off on a lust-fueled search for escape, only to drift further, until a woman from a radically different life forces a reckoning. It’s a three-generation drama, and on paper at least, one that suggests Stone is coming back with something more personal than polemical.
Deadline’s report says production is gearing up across Thailand, Rome, and Bulgaria, with Fernando Sulichin’s New Element Media back in the mix after having worked with Stone on “Savages” and “Snowden.”
Earlier this month, Stone said he had been trying to get “White Lies” made for years, describing it as the lower-budget feature he kept returning to after a long stretch away from fiction filmmaking. He had also previously said he likely had one more ambitious narrative film left in him. “White Lies” is now the film bringing him back to narrative features.
The movie has had a long, messy road here. Variety first reported it back in 2018 with del Toro attached. Then, last year, the film seemed to lurch back to life again, only to wobble amid financing uncertainty. That Hartnett is now in the lead, and the production is again moving, tells you Stone hasn’t let go of it, even after the project kept slipping through his hands. Whether Hartnett changes the material’s temperature from whatever it was in the del Toro version is another question. Still, he’s been on a strong run lately and has the right mix of bruised intensity and movie-star reserve for something like this.
In the meantime, Hartnett’s calendar is hardly empty. He’s also set to appear in Michael Showalter’s “Verity,” alongside Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson, in an adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s novel that shifted from a May release to the fall. As for Stone, “White Lies” now looks like the project that may finally pull him back into the narrative-feature arena after a decade spent mostly orbiting documentaries, political storms, and false starts.
