PETER LANDESMAN has been by turns an award-winning investigative journalist, war correspondent, award-winning novelist, and painter.
As a journalist, he reported on the conflicts in Kosovo, Pakistan and Afghanistan post-9/11, and Rwanda. He launched investigations into weapons trafficking; sex trafficking and slavery; drug and refugee trafficking; and the anatomy of the lethal violence of street gangs in Los Angeles. His reports were filed for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker, among other publications. Kill the Messenger was the first screenplay that Mr. Landesman wrote.
His 2004 New York Times Magazine article "The Girls Next Door" was adapted into the 2007 feature Trade, directed by Marco Kreuzpainter and starring Kevin Kline, Paulina Gaitan, and Cesar Ramos.
He subsequently wrote and directed the film Parkland, based in part on Vincent Bugliosi's book of the same name, for producers Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman, about the immediate aftermath in Dallas of the JFK assassination in November 1963. The feature, which world-premiered at the 2013 Venice International Film Festival, starred Billy Bob Thornton, Paul Giamatti, Zac Efron, Marcia Gay Harden, Jacki Weaver, Ron Livingston, and James Badge Dale.
Mr. Landesman is slated to reteam with Kill the Messenger producer Scott Stuber on Down by the River, which is inspired by Charles Bowden's nonfiction book of the same name, and which he is writing and will direct. The thriller revolves around DEA activities at and around the U.S.-Mexican border.
He was also at work on a U.S. television series adaptation of the Israeli television drama Shkufilm [False Flag], tracking eight citizens implicated in an international crime.
In October 2014, Mr. Landesman directs another script he wrote, for Sony Pictures and Ridley Scott, starring Will Smith, about the discovery, and subsequent cover-up, of the epidemic of concussions – and deaths – among NFL football players.
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