Over a year ago word first broke that Leonardo DiCaprio would be producing and portraying one of the first documented serial killers in America. Now I believe there comes a time when he will change the course of his career and instead of playing the protagonist DiCaprio will play main antagonist.
On Christmas day of next year he will star as a cruel slave owner Calvin Candie in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. Furthermore, late November he signed on to play HH Holmes in the adaptation of the 2003 non-fiction Erik Larson’s novel The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic And Madness At The Fair That Changed America.
Well, after being picked up by Warner Bros. from Appian Way the project the studio has finally set Graham Moore to script the story of one of the most notorious serial killers in Chicago history.
British novelist Moore previously wrote The Imitation Game based on the true story of the World War Two cryptologist Alan Turing, which tops this year’s Black List of the best unproduced screenplay and was sold in October to Warner brothers for seven figures as a possible project for Leonardo DiCaprio.
Moore, the guy that knows what he is doing told the papers:
I was obsessed with Devil in the White City for a decade. My high school was 50 yard away from where the Chicago World’s Fair was held, and I played soccer on a field near where Holmes murdered about 200 people. It was a truly horrible crime, but it’s a very Chicago story. Though I moved to LA, I think of myself as fundamentally Mid-Western, and in a weird way, this is a dark and twisted tribute to my hometown.
He also comments on the similarities between Turing and Holmes:
Turing was a great genius and in a twisted evil way, so was Holmes,” Moore told me. “Turing was this British mathematician who on the outside wasn’t likeable at all, who was difficult and a bit rude, but who was a great human being inside. Holmes was a most likable guy who inwardly was a tremendous monster. I’m drawn to stories where the role of villain and hero get murky and I thought it would be different to tell the Holmes story from his perspective, and put a little humanity into him. That’s not easy because it’s like trying to care for a caricature and you read the book and every time he does something horrible, you read 10 pages further and he’s done something even worse. In my head, the most unsettling part of Holmes isn’t what he did, but in what ways we notice bits of him that exist inside us and don’t make us feel very good. I credit Warner Bros with taking a risk on me with both of these projects. It has been a surreal six months for me.
Production on the film in which Chicago will be prominently featured is expected to start early next year, but there’s not yet set a start date.
The Devil in the White City comes to theaters sometime in 2013.
HH Holmes
