Timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the James Bond franchise and that recently debuted Skyfall teaser, Variety reports that a biopic is in the works on James Bond creator Ian Fleming, whose real-life exploits as a secret agent made him much more complex and interesting than his famous character, or so he would tell women. The project is being developed by director Duncan Jones (a man whose films Moon and Source Code have allowed him to escape the shadow of his "Zowie Bowie" code name) with a screenplay based on Andrew Lycett's biography, The Man Behind James Bond. Like that book, it will cover Fleming's life as a womanizing British intelligence officer who imbued his famous creation with most of his own tastes and viewpoints, earning for his efforts plenty of criticism as a classist, racist, sadomasochism-loving misogynist who could barely string a paragraph together, in addition to a lawsuit seemingly every other day.
But there's also plenty of spy movie intrigue to Fleming's story, as previously given the biopic treatment in 1989's Goldeneye: The Secret Life Of Ian Fleming and 1990's The Secret Life Of Ian Fleming, where Game Of Thrones' Charles Dance and Jason Connery (son of Sean) portrayed the author, to varying degrees of ridiculousness. No doubt a fan campaign is already in motion to attract most obvious candidate Benedict Cumberbatch, whose name is a trigger devised by Her Majesty's Secret Service to cloud the minds of foreign enemies.