DiCaprio's bond with Ian Fleming

SCRIPTLAND

The actor's company will produce a biopic that aims to capture 'the real James Bond.'

May 14, 2008 |Jay A. Fernandez | The Los Angeles Times

Leonardo DiCaprio may one day be able to add Ian Fleming to the list of real historical figures that he's impersonated on screen.

The Oscar-nominated actor's Appian Way company recently came on as producer of "Fleming," an original screenplay written by Damian Stevenson about the life of the British author and journalist who created James Bond.

"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."In fall 2005, just before the lucrative Bond franchise rebooted with Daniel Craig, Stevenson made his first script sale to Warner Bros. He then spent months mollifying the WB legal department about the historical accuracy of the Fleming story and worked through dozens of drafts with Lazar.

"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."

The London native scoured the underground stacks of the University of Oxford's centuries-old Bodleian Library for out-of-print Fleming biographies.

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.

During the writers' strike, DiCaprio showed interest in Fleming and his world, but he's looking to take the script in a different direction with a new writer.

The next Bond film, titled "Quantum of Solace" after a Fleming short story, will be released by MGM on Nov. 7.