Shoot dates and locations are now in place for the forthcoming feature film about ill-fated amateur sailor Donald Crowhurst.

Colin Firth will play the failed businessman who, in 1968, entered the Sunday Times Golden Globe race, partly as an opportunity to publicise a new nautical navigation device he had been working on. He fitted another of his inventions, a stability system, to his untested trimaran and set off to on his solo mission to circumnavigate the globe. 

The story took a sad twist when Crowhurst’s inexperience began to show and, rather than face a dangerous voyage, he began to concoct an elaborate hoax by falsifying his location reports, which positioned him as the potential winner. But after months of radio silence, his boat was eventually found drifting and empty, and the assumption was made that he had drowned. 

The logs and diaries he kept made for tragic reading, as they documented a man’s descent into a state of tortured psychological anguish as he faced the pressure of the race and a growing distrust of his vessel. 

The film comes from Blueprint Pictures and producers Graham Broadbent and Pete Czernin. Director du jour James Marsh (The Theory of Everything) will call the shots from a screenplay by Scott Z Burns, with shooting lined up for late spring in the UK and Malta. 
 
Full details on Production Intelligence, where you will also find the casting director and line producer names.