DiCaprio loves playing these roles.  Roles that were once real people that lived and died.  This time he may take on a role that created a long lasting franchise.  Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond is about to get his own biopic.

DiCaprio’s company, Appian Way has recently come on to this film as a producer for the biopic.

“It’s going to be very different from the Bond films,” says producer Andrew Lazar (”Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” “Get Smart”), who first championed the project. “There are a lot of different ways to crack biopics, but we’re not trying to emulate a Bond movie . . . The idea that this guy’s life informed the James Bond character is pretty fascinating.”

It’s the real James Bond,” says the 35-year-old Stevenson, who previously worked as a development executive at Kopelson Entertainment and DreamWorks. “In England, Ian Fleming’s exploits are much better well known. Talking to people out here, no one had any idea that M was based on a real person, Miss Moneypenny was based on a real person.”

His latest version of the screenplay begins on the eve of Fleming’s Jamaica wedding in 1952, just before his first Bond novel, “Casino Royale,” was published (a wedding present to his new wife).

It then flashes back to Fleming’s years as a Reuters journalist stationed in Moscow and then a Commander of Naval Intelligence (MI6 code name “17F”) during World War II who devised innovative spying plots.

Fleming later drew from his own playboy life and his espionage contemporaries’ to invent one of literature and film’s most enduring characters.

This could turn out to be a really great movie.  A movie about the real James Bond could be something very special. 

I personally hope that DiCaprio DOESN’T play Fleming.  He’s a very fine actor, but I’m really and honestly sick of the guy.  Besides, I don’t think he’d fit the role anyways, besides, there are plenty of British actors that would be a better choice to play Fleming instead of this guy.  That said, if this movie gets made with DiCaprio attached the I would expect that he’ll play the lead but again, I don’t see it working.

The life story of Fleming would probably turn out to be a very interesting one, I I’d like to see it made, but as usual things go who knows if it will ever get made anyways.

Source: LA Times

-Phil