Leonardo DiCaprio to play Leonardo da Vinci in new biopic

Cowabunga! Leonardo is set to play Leonardo. Should be good.

Paramount have beaten Universal for the rights to Walter Isaacson’s book on Leonardo da Vinci and they have got Leonardo DiCaprio to star in the biopic.

It is still very early in the process so there is no director announced at the moment.

Here is the book synopsis:

Based on thousands of pages from Leonardo’s astonishing notebooks and new discoveries about his life and work, Walter Isaacson weaves a narrative that connects his art to his science. He shows how Leonardo’s genius was based on skills we can improve in ourselves, such as passionate curiosity, careful observation, and an imagination so playful that it flirted with fantasy.

He produced the two most famous paintings in history, The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. But in his own mind, he was just as much a man of science and technology. With a passion that sometimes became obsessive, he pursued innovative studies of anatomy, fossils, birds, the heart, flying machines, botany, geology, and weaponry. His ability to stand at the crossroads of the humanities and the sciences, made iconic by his drawing of Vitruvian Man, made him history’s most creative genius.

His creativity, like that of other great innovators, came from having wide-ranging passions. He peeled the flesh off the faces of cadavers, drew the muscles that move the lips, and then painted history’s most memorable smile. He explored the math of optics, showed how light rays strike the cornea and produced illusions of changing perspectives in The Last Supper. Isaacson also describes how Leonardo’s lifelong enthusiasm for staging theatrical productions informed his paintings and inventions.

Leonardo’s delight at combining diverse passions remains the ultimate recipe for creativity. So, too, does his ease at being a bit of a misfit: illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted, and at times heretical. His life should remind us of the importance of instilling, both in ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge but a willingness to question it—to be imaginative and, like talented misfits and rebels in any era, to think different.

DiCaprio’s mother famously claims to have chosen the artist as her son’s namesake when she felt an in utero DiCaprio kick for the first time while examining a da Vinci piece at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy back in 1974.

Leonardo DiCaprio is an amazing actor and I have no doubt that we will be fantastic in the role. However, I hope they don’t try and fit the entire life of da Vinci into the film. That often ends up with things being rushed and overlooked. I would much rather they focused on a particular point in his life or an aspect of his creative process and followed that through.

What would you like to see in the film?

Source: Variety