Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio are looking to team up together for a fourth time after Paramount snapped up the rights to Edmund Morris’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Rise Of Theodore Roosevelt. The book will provide the details for a screenplay about Teddy’s life, with Nicholas Meyer currently on script duty (Fatal Attraction, The Human Stain).
“His life reads like a movie that requires a big bag of popcorn,” says Daniella Taplin who will produce along with Scorsese. So will the eventual film span the 26th American President’s entire life?
“We start at 25, as he begins to transform himself,” Taplin says. “Through sheer force of will he goes from this asthmatic, near-sighted 125-pounder to a Sherman tank of a man so tough that he once got shot on the way to make a speech and completed his talk, bleeding with a bullet in his chest.”
Leo won’t need speed dial to ask Marty about his role - they are currently toiling away on The Departed, a rework of the Hong Kong crime drama Infernal Affairs.