04 March,2011 06:49 AM IST | | Agencies
Hollywood film mogul Steven Spielberg has bought the rights to the story of the WikiLeaks saga.
The Guardian was one of the five media outlets used by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to publicise the thousands of classified US documents relating to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and diplomatic cables.
Steven Spielberg
Reportedly conceived as an investigative thriller, the film will be backed by DreamWorks the studio founded in 1994 by Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen.
The movie will be based on the book that charts Julian Assange's life from his itinerant childhood to the creation of the WikiLeaks website in 2006.
It also provides the inside story of Assange's partnership with The Guardian and the release of more than 2,50,000 secret diplomatic cables.
The Guardian is already considering front runners for who Spielberg will cast as Assange: John Inman, Tilda Swinton, Macaulay Culkin or Orlando Bloom.
In earlier interviews about the WikiLeaks movie, Assange had told one Brazilian interviewer that he wants his role to be played by Will Smith.
Assange Appeals
Lawyers for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have lodged an appeal against a British court ruling that he should be extradited to Sweden over rape accusations, the court said yesterday. A court official confirmed that it had received the request for an appeal, but no date has yet been set for a hearing.
