DiCaprio's latest

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Leonardo DiCaprio is set to star in "The Chancellor Manuscript," a political thriller based on a novel by Robert Ludlum, whose books spawned the Matt Damon hits "The Bourne Identity" and "The Bourne Supremacy."

Paramount Pictures is in final negotiations to acquire the rights to the book, which will be adapted by Michael Seitzman.

The novel was published in 1977, though the big-screen version will be updated. DiCaprio will play novelist Peter Chancellor, who is writing a thriller about Washington power brokers being blackmailed with information gathered by intelligence agencies in order to alter U.S. policy. When Chancellor's work of fiction turns out to have stumbled into reality, he ends up on a run for his life, becoming like a character from his own novel.

"We live in this crazy post-Patriot Act environment where Benjamin Franklin's warning that those that give up essential liberties for temporary security don't deserve either one are being ignored, so the subject matter seemed ripe," Seitzman said in an interview.

Of DiCaprio, he added: "This is not pap, but there really is no one better for this than Leo. The author is supposed to be an author, not an action hero. You're supposed to buy him as a gifted intellectual. Chancellor has only imagined the world outside his four walls, but now, not only does he have to be a participant in it, he has to save it."