It’s been more than a year since we’ve heard much about any of the various films based on WikiLeaks and enigmatic – not to mention increasingly troubled – founder Julian Assange. Now it appears DreamWorks is looking to get a little traction on its project, trying to tempt Jeremy Renner to play Assange and chatting to Bill Condon about directing.
Everything is apparently still in the putting-out-feelers-stage, though Deadline reports that Renner is seriously interested in the idea. We can certainly see the resemblance between the two, though Renner is probably what Assange imagines he looks like in his dreams.
Condon, meanwhile, has been finishing the second half of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part Two and is in the market for a new challenge. And what could be more different than a film about a pale-skinned outsider who sees himself as a different species to everyone else?
Whether either of them end up signing on is another matter, but if DreamWorks does snag them, it would go some way to putting their take on the Assange story, adapted from the books WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War On Secrecy, 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.
It’s also possible that everyone who was trying to jump on the idea, including Universal and HBO, are waiting to see how Assange’s current legal issues play out...