One of the hottest topics in Hollywood right now is Julian Assange. Assange is the man behind Wikileaks and for a while, he was in every newspaper and magazine across the country. It’s no surprise that Hollywood would hop on the Assange train and currently, there are four films in production about the man who made government leaders sweat and shake in their shoes.
The first film is coming to us from HBO and it was announced today that Charles Ferguson will direct. Ferguson was behind the award winning documentary Inside Job, which was a fantastic film. The film will be based on Raffi Khatchadourian‘s June 7, 2010 article in The New Yorker called No Secrets: Julian Assange’s Mission for Total Transparency. It will mainly revolve around Assange and Wikileaks in the days leading up to the release of the Apache helicopter footage.
The other film in production will be directed by another talented documentarian, Alex Gibney. Most recently you may have seen Gibney’s Eliot Spitzer doc called Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer. “We’re moving, and we’ve been moving for four months,” Gibney said about the project.“He’s a fascinating figure,” Gibney continued on, “because no one knows if he did it. We only have the word of one convicted hacker (Adrian Lamo, who handed Manning’s name to the FBI), and if he did, why he did it.” His film will be based off the novel The Most Dangerous Man in the World by Andrew Fowler.
Lastly, we have Mark Boal‘s film based on the New York Times Magazine article The Boy Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest: Dealing With Assange And The WikiLeaks Secrets and then there’s the one set up at Dreamworks based on the books Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website and WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy.
Simply put, if you didn’t know who Assange was before now, you’re about to become very familiar with him.