Paramount has hired high-profile writer John Logan to adapt Walter Isaacson’s biography “Leonardo da Vinci,” with Leonardo DiCaprio playing the painter/scientist.
DiCaprio and Jennifer Davisson are producing through their Appian Way banner. Paramount won movie rights in August following a multi-studio bidding battle.
Logan’s screen credits include “Alien: Covenant,” “Genius,” the two most recent James Bond movies “Spectre” and “Skyfall,” and a trio of scripts that received Academy Award nominations — “Gladiator,” “The Aviator,” and “Hugo.” It’s Logan’s second collaboration with DiCaprio, more than a decade after he scripted the Howard Hughes biopic “The Aviator.”
DiCaprio is starring next in the untitled Quentin Tarantino movie about the Manson Family. The actor has a strong connection to the da Vinci project: he got his first name from the famous painter, as his pregnant mother was looking at a da Vinci painting in a museum in Italy when the future star kicked for the first time.
Isaacson’s book, published by Simon & Schuster in October, was based on thousands of pages from da Vinci’s notebooks and focused on his passionate curiosity, careful observation, and imagination. In addition to painting the “Mona Lisa” and “The Last Supper,” he pursued studies of anatomy, fossils, birds, the heart, flying machines, botany, geology, and weaponry.
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