Leonardo DiCaprio and Paramount Pictures are producing a film about the 15th century polymath Leonardo da Vinci. The film will be based on Walter Isaacson’s non-fiction book Leonardo Da Vinci, which was published in 2017.
DiCaprio will play the artist and inventor, according to the Deadline report. DiCaprio has previously stated in interviews that he got his name because his mother, then pregnant, was looking at a da Vinci painting when the Titanic hero kicked in her belly for the first time.
Acclaimed screenwriter John Logan, who has written Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000), Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator (2004) and Hugo (2011), and the James Bond movies Skyfall (2012) and Spectre (2015), is attached to the project. “Logan has plenty to work with from Isaacson, who used Da Vinci’s notebooks to weave a narrative that connects his art to his science and voracious curiosity and imagination,” Deadline stated. “Isaacson also describes how Leonardo’s lifelong enthusiasm for staging theatrical productions informed his paintings and inventions. According to the book, he also was a bit of a misfit: illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted and at times heretical.”
Some of DiCaprio’s best roles have been based on real-life personalities. The Hollywood star has played American novelist Tobias Wolff (This Boy’s Life, 1993), American poet Jim Carroll (The Basketball Diaries, 1995), French poet Arthur Rimbaud (Total Eclipse, 1995), conman Frank Abagnale Jr (Catch Me If You Can, 2002), entrepreneur Howard Hughes (The Aviator, 2002), Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J Edgar Hoover (J Edgar, 2011) and former stockbroker Jordan Belfort (The Wolf of Wall Street, 2013).
