After rising to fame thanks to his performances in films such as The Baader Meinhof Complex [+], Run Lola Run and Lammbock, German actor Moritz Bleibtreu is now ready to make his directorial debut, with Cortex. “As an actor, you often find yourself in the position of having to provide some kind of justification for content over which you do not, in fact, have control and that you are also actually not responsible for, because you neither wrote the script nor directed,” he said on set last Wednesday, the German Press Agency reports. Written, directed and produced by Bleibtreu, the psycho-thriller will tell the story of Hagen (Bleibtreu himself), a man in his 50s who is experiencing frequent nightmares and can no longer distinguish between dreams and reality. Time and again, he dreams that his wife Karoline (Nadja Uhl) is having an affair with a young outlaw named Niko (Jannis Niewöhner). Other parts are to be played by Marc Hosemann, Anna Bederke and Nicholas Ofczarek. Filming, which started on 26 February and is planned to wrap on 18 April, is taking place in Hamburg and Berlin, with Thomas W Kiennast (3 Days in Quiberon [+], The Dark Valley [+]) on board as the film’s director of photography.