Leonardo DiCaprio must have enjoyed making Blood Diamond, because he’s already lining up another political thriller with Warner Bros, which takes on another set of corrupt corporate money-men exploiting weaker countries.
This time it’s Enron, in an adaptation of Conspiracy Of Fools, the book by New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald.
Telling the tale of a newcomer to the energy company who slowly begins to expose the fraudulent accounting that saw Enron go bankrupt in 2001, Conspiracy Of Fool’s basic story has previously been seen in cinemas, in the 2005 documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room (adapted from a different book, mind).
DiCaprio will produce and star, and we can expect it to be an altogether more thrilling affair than the fact-packed Smartest Guys.
As scriptwriter Sheldon Turner puts it: “Kurt made the factual stuff read like a thriller, and it felt right to tell the story from the point of view of an outsider,” he said. “The goal was to take it away from feeling like a staid look at a corporation and turn it into a character study of how people react under adversity.”
