EXCLUSIVE: Paramount has set John Logan to adapt the Walter Isaacson book Leonardo da Vinci as a star vehicle for Leonardo DiCaprio to play the painter/scientist. DiCaprio and Jennifer Davisson are producing through their Appian Way banner. Paramount won the book last year following a multi-studio bidding battle. Logan’s recent screen credits include Genius, Specter, Gladiator and Skyfall, and this is his second collaboration with DiCaprio after he scripted the Martin Scorsese-directed Howard Hughes pic The Aviator.

Logan will write it while DiCaprio goes off to star in the untitled next film by writer/director Quentin Tarantino in their first teaming since Django Unchained. The da Vinci project is special for DiCaprio, who got his first name because his pregnant mother was looking at a Leonardo da Vinci painting in a museum in Italy when the future star kicked for the first time. It seems like fate that the actor should play the artist who painted The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa.

Logan has plenty to work with from Isaacson, who used Da Vinci’s notebooks to weave a narrative that connects his art to his science and voracious curiosity and imagination. Aside from his priceless paintings, he pursued innovative studies of anatomy (his iconic drawing of Vitruvian Man), fossils, birds, the heart, flying machines, botany, geology and weaponry. 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. According to the book, he also was a bit of a misfit: illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted and at times heretical.

CAA-repped Logan is a top-shelf scribe, showing Paramount and Appian Way are serious about getting this one right.

Universal Pictures has found its director for the high-priority Leonardo da Vinci film. “All of Us Strangers” helmer Andrew Haigh has signed on to direct and adapt Walter Isaacson’s acclaimed biography of the Renaissance man.

Based on thousands of pages from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks and new discoveries about his life and work, Isaacson’s book became one of the hottest literary properties when it hit the market in 2017. At the time, Universal was outbid by Paramount, which developed the project with Leonardo DiCaprio for years before putting it in turnaround. Universal quietly picked it up last year. The runaway bestseller connects da Vinci’s transcendent art, which includes the Mona Lisa painting hanging in the Louvre, to his trailblazing science — and shows how his genius was driven by an insatiable curiosity, careful observation and a whimsical imagination. The Italian icon lived from 1452-1519 during the height of the Renaissance, one of the most creative spurts in human history.

Christopher Hampton wrote a previous version of the screenplay.

Haigh is an award-winning British writer-director, whose critically acclaimed 2023 film “All of Us Strangers” from Searchlight Pictures received six BAFTA nominations including best director and best adapted screenplay for Haigh. “All of Us Strangers” also landed three Independent Spirit Awards nominations. His previous films include A24’s “Lean on Pete” and IFC’s “45 Years,” for which Charlotte Rampling nabbed a best actress Academy Award nomination. After his breakout debut in 2011 with “Weekend,” Haigh also worked in TV, serving as an executive producer as well as the lead writer-director on HBO’s “Looking.” He also directed all five episodes of the 2012 limited series “The North Water” for BBC and AMC.

The da Vinci film marks Universal’s second adaptation of an Isaacson book. The studio also brought his 2011 biography “Steve Jobs” to the big screen with Danny Boyle at the helm.

Universal’s senior VP of production development Ryan Jones will oversee the project on behalf of the studio. 

Haigh is repped by CAA and Anonymous Content. Isaacson is handled by CAA.