Paramount Pictures has won a bidding war with Universal Pictures to the rights to Walter Isaacson’s book Leonardo da Vinci, reports Deadline. In addition to starring, DiCaprio will produce the film with Jennifer Davisson through their Appian Way, which has a first-look deal with Paramount. The Leonardo da Vinci biopic will be published by Simon & Schuster on October 17, 2017 and is officially described as follows:
He was history’s most creative genius. What secrets can he teach us?
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 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.
Isaacson also wrote Steve Jobs, which was adapted by Danny Boyle into a film starring Michael Fassbender in 2015. He also wrote biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Henry Kissinger and Albert Einstein, the latter of which was the basis for the National Geographic series Genius, starring Geoffrey Rush.
