'Room' Helmer Lenny Abrahamson to Direct Adaptation of 'The Grand Escape' (Exclusive)

The Neal Bascomb book follows three pilots who lead a WWI POW prison escape.

Film4 and Element Pictures have optioned Neal Bascomb's upcoming book The Grand Escape, with Room helmer Lenny Abrahamson attached to direct.

Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe's Element Pictures, the production banner that's worked with Abrahamson on his last few pictures including Room, and Film4 teamed to acquire the rights in a competitive situation. A writer to adapt Bascomb's book has not yet been attached.

Grand Escape is the true story of three daredevil World War I pilots being held in Germany's most infamous POW prison. The story chronicles WWI's greatest mass prison escape, and the pilots' subsequent flight to freedom.

Bascomb, whose next book The Winter Fortress comes out in May, is currently working on Grand Escape, which will publish via Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Abrahamson was nominated for an Oscar this year for helming Room, which starred Brie Larson as a woman who was abducted and raised a child while being held in a small one-room shed for seven years. Larson won the best actress Oscar for the role.

Abrahamson's other films include Frank, starring Michael Fassbender, and What Richard Did. He is attached to direct and co-write with Jon Raymond A Man's World, the story of boxer Emile Griffith. Abrahamson is repped by WME and the Casarotto Ramsay Agency in the U.K.

WME also repped the film rights.