Tradecraft: Champagne and Infiltrator

There are a couple of spy items in the trades today. The Hollywood Reporter, er, reports that Israeli writer-director Nadav Schirman has signed a deal to turn his documentary The Champagne Spy into a fictionalized English language feature. The Champage Spy "is a portrait of Wolfgang Lotz, an Israeli spy who became addicted to his covert identity as ex-Nazi playboy and millionaire horse breeder in 1960s Cairo."

Variety, meanwhile, profiles writer Joshua Zetumer as one of its "10 Writers To Watch." Zetumer is currently writing The Infiltrator, "a story about British soldiers going undercover in the IRA, based on an article in Atlantic Monthly. [The movie] is set up at Warner Bros with David Benioff producing and Leonardo DiCaprio [you know, that famous British actor?] attached to star." The project sounds somewhat similar to DeCaprio's other gestating spy flick, Penetration. Zetumer name-checks all the big espionage touchstones for Variety: "The Infiltrator is a thinking-man's action movie. It's got these big set-pieces, but at the same time it's kind of an anti-James Bond film. It's inspired mainly by John le Carre, but with a good dose of The Bourne Identity thrown in."