Given the subject material, Speilberg wouldn’t be the first name on my director’s list for a Wikileaks film, but according to several news reports – it’s a good chance of happening now that Dreamworks (co-owned by the beard) has purchased the rights to two competing Wikileaks books that tells the inside story of Aussie Julian Assange’s role at the head of the whistle-blowing organisation and how the Wikileaks material was released to news organisations and online.
The Guardian is reporting that film rights were purchased for WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, written by David Leigh and Luke Harding and Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website, by Daniel Domscheit-Berg.
The Wikileaks story is likely to appeal to Hollywood for all the obvious reasons, given Wikileak’s dramatic assortment of characters led by Assange, with no shortage of double-crosses, secret agents and international politics set on a global scale.
Reports also add that Speilberg will personally oversee the development of the film with an option to direct. Speilberg’s Munich, one of the director’s darkest forays into a world of murky international politics, also dealt with secret agents and shadowy agendas of the 1970s – and it’s this film and not the sentimental whimsy of Hook or The Terminal which gives me the most hope that Speilberg could cut the mustard with a hard boiled Wikileaks pic.
Speilberg’s Aussie connection might not stop with Julian Assange, given Australian Eric Bana starred as the lead in his 1970s terrorist pic, Munich.
[via The Guardian and Slate]