A new report suggests that Whiplash and Babylon director Damien Chazelle’s Evel Knievel movie will film this summer, with Leonardo DiCaprio to star.
It was first reported last December that Damien Chazelle, director of Whiplash, First Man and La La Land, has plans to make a film about stunt rider Evel Knievel. Despite his own fears that he may have unofficially wound up in ‘director jail’ following the financial disappointment of his Hollywood epic, Babylon, he was said to be in talks to with Paramount over the production, with Leonardo DiCaprio set to take on the title role.
Three months on, and Chazelle’s currently-untitled film appears to be moving along nicely. According to Puck (via Far Out Magazine), negotiations are underway to have DiCaprio star as Knievel, with filming said to be planned for the summer of 2025.
A few details about the film itself have also emerged. One draft was written by William Monahan (Kingdom Of Heaven, The Departed) before another Scorsese collaborator, Terence Winter (The Wolf Of Wall Street) took over. Chazelle himself has said to have taken a recent pass at the screenplay. Its story will reportedly take place largely in 1974, and focus on Knievel’s daredevil attempt to pull off a 1.6 mile jump across Snake River Canyon in a steam-powered rocket.
The background drama that led up to the jump could also make it to the screen, with a number of promoters and investors involved in Knievel’s stunt. Most of them ended up losing money.
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Released in 2022, Babylon was Chazelle’s passion project: an era-spanning, visually sumptuous delve into Hollywood’s seedy, excessive underbelly in the first half of the 20th century. Some critics (unfairly, in this writer’s humble opinion) wrote harshly about it, while Paramount Pictures ended up losing money on the production, which cost somewhere in the region of $80m.
Paramount, it seems, is no longer involved with Chazelle’s Knievel film; Puck reports that there isn’t a production company currently attached, but Netflix, Amazon, Apple and Warner Bros are all said to be in interested.
Chazelle appears to gravitate towards characters who push themselves to the limit in the pursuit of excellence, whether it’s jazz drummers (Whiplash) or melancholy astronauts (First Man). Viewed like this, it’s easy to see why Evel Knievel, who broke over 400 bones over his long career as a stunt performer, would be of interest to him.
More on this as we get it.
