Steven Spielberg‘s studio DreamWorks are set to bring the WikiLeaks story to the big screen after buying the rights to a book based on the controversies.
The studio has snapped up screen rights to Inside WikiLeaks: Julian Assange’s War On Secrecy by journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding, the Guardian reports.
The book looks the creation of the website in 2006, as well as Assange‘s explosive partnership with the Guardian and the release last year of over 250,000 secret diplomatic cables, which caused worldwide controversy.
The newspaper’s editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger said: “The Guardian‘s unique collaboration with WikiLeaks led to what some have described as one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years.”
Of the proposed film, he added: “It’s Woodward and Bernstein meets Stieg Larsson meets Jason Bourne. Plus the odd moment of sheer farce and, in Julian Assange, a compelling character who goes beyond what any Hollywood scriptwriter would dare to invent.”
DreamWorks have also snapped up rights to another book, Inside WikiLeaks, by Assange‘s former colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg.
Deadline Hollywood‘s Mike Fleming told the paper: “A good template for what they are thinking is The Social Network, where Aaron Sorkin not only used the Ben Mezrich book The Accidental Billionaires as a resource, but gathered actual testimony from the lawsuits filed against Mark Zuckerberg that detailed the formation of Facebook and provided high drama.”