Clint Eastwood could follow up the spectacular box office success of his controversial Iraq war drama American Sniper by directing Jonah Hill and Leonardo DiCaprio in the story of a failed Olympic bomb plot, reports Deadline.
Hill, Oscar-nominated for supporting roles in Moneyball and The Wolf of Wall Street, has been tipped since February to play the lead role of heroic security guard Richard Jewell, who foiled the attempt at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics but later came under police suspicion and suffered an invasive trial by media that left his life in ruins. In a reverse of the acting duo’s Wolf of Wall Street dynamic, DiCaprio is in line to play a southern lawyer who helped Jewell escape his nightmare, though the actor’s involvement is not yet confirmed. The film is based on the Vanity Fair article The Ballad of Richard Jewell, which tells the story of the security guard’s rise to fame and subsequent vilification.
Jewell, who died in 2007, saved countless lives when he sounded the alarm after discovering a backpack containing pipe bombs at the Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta. The explosive did go off, however, with one person killed and dozens more injured in the resulting blast. The former police officer was eventually completely exonerated, with anti-abortion, anti-gay terrorist Eric Robert Rudolph later found to have built the bomb, and the security guard went on to sue the NBC and CNN networks for their part in attacking him.
Eastwood, 84, finds himself the toast of Hollywood after American Sniper took more than $535m worldwide and became the US box office’s top-grossing film of 2014. Starring Bradley Cooper as US Navy Seal Chris Kyle, the film also picked up six Oscar nominations and excellent reviews, despite vilification in some quarters for its depiction of the real-life sniper’s deadly work in Iraq.
The veteran director usually works at Warner Bros, but Jewell’s story is set up at rival studio Twentieth Century Fox, so negotiations will be necessary before Eastwood can sign on. Deadline reports that the companies may take a co-production credit to allow the film to move ahead. Paul Greengrass and David O Russell are among the other directors who have previously considered taking on the high-profile project, which has a screenplay by Captain Phillips’s Oscar-nominated Billy Ray.
