Joseph Gordon-Levitt poses with his Emmy Award at the Nokia Theatre on August 16 in Los Angeles, California. Photo: CFP

Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt will play Edward Snowden in a movie directed by Oliver Stone about the former National Security Agency contractor who blew the whistle on the US government's mass surveillance programs, the film's backers said on Monday.

Stone, who won best director Oscars for Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, has written the screenplay based on two books - The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man by Luke Harding and Time of the Octopus by Anatoly Kucherena.

The still untitled film goes into production in Munich in January, said independent studio Open Road Films and production and financing company Endgame Entertainment.

Producer Moritz Borman said in a statement that he and Stone chose Open Road and Endgame because "this film needs an independent in the true sense, where political pressures will not come into play."

Snowden leaked tens of thousands of classified intelligence documents to the media in 2013 and sparked a firestorm over the NSA's gathering of data from the Internet activities and phones of millions of ordinary Americans and dozens of world leaders.

Snowden spent almost six weeks at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport before Russia granted him asylum for a year on August 1, 2013, creating a furor in the US. In August this year he was given a three-year resident permit by Russia and now lives at an undisclosed address in Moscow.