It was inevitable really that at some point, a bright spark in Hollywood would decide it was a good idea to make a movie about Julian Assange, the controversial founder of Wikileaks. Realising they’d better jump in before anyone else does, Variety reports that Josephson Entertainment and Michelle Krumm Productions have optioned the rights to Aussie reporter Andrew Fowler’s upcoming biography of Assange, ‘The Most Dangerous Man In the World’.
The book, due out later this year, will chronicle Julian Assange’s life from his early childhood all the way up to the founding of WikiLeaks and the controversy surrounding the site. By then of course, events will have moved on – Assange is, after all, stuck in the UK waiting to hear if he’ll be extradited to Sweden on sexual assault charges, says he fears he’ll be sent to the States and executed, and is carrying on his work releasing sensitive, secret documents into the public domain. Whether any movie will wait to see how all this pans out isn’t known.
Producer Michelle Krumm says “As soon as I met Andrew and read a few chapters of his profound book, I knew that — with his incredibly extensive depth of knowledge — it would enable us to bring a thought-provoking thriller to the screen.” Barry Joesphson adds, “Like All the President’s Men in its day, The Most Dangerous Man in the World is this generation’s suspenseful drama with global impact.”
However while it’s difficult to deny that Woodward and Bernstein in All The President’s Men should be applauded for their work finding out how corrupt the Nixon administration was, Assange lives in a far more grey area, where he seems to be both hero and villain (not least because he looks like a James Bond baddie). It’ll be interest to see how any film version paints him – will they just present him as the little man fighting against the big, bad system, or show the seemingly more real image of a man who lives in a state of complete paranoia (some justified, some not), whose motivations may be noble and who has done some good, but whose actions often border on the irresponsible.
We’ll have to wait and see.