Francis Wheen: Show Me the Kapital to make "Karl Marx the Movie"
Oliver Duff

Francis Wheen's 1999 biography of Karl Marx portrayed an endearing, cigar-chomping Victorian hellraiser prone to intellectual bullying, drunken pub crawls and organising his daughter's suitors; penniless and largely ignored in his lifetime. Fans of the book included the militia leaders of Afghanistan's anti-Taliban Northern Alliance.

Now Wheen, columnist, historian and deputy editor of Private Eye, is in talks to turn his opus into a film. On Friday, he met in Paris with the Haitian director Raoul Peck, a former cab driver who became the Haitian Culture minister during a brief democratic hiatus, soon to work with Martin Scorsese.

"It's early days, but quite exciting," Wheen tells Pandora. "Raoul Peck seems very nice. We're putting together a treatment and finding funds from somewhere."

Wheen has been here before - in 1999, with movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, then boss of Miramax. Weinstein sent his emissary Tina Brown to London to tell Wheen that he loved the book, wanted Tom Stoppard to write a screenplay and planned to cast Ralph Fiennes as Marx and Gwyneth Paltrow as the aristocratic wife, Jenny von Westphalen.

Weinstein and Brown's interest evaporated. A subsequent BBC dramatisation was pulled when Greg Dyke "suddenly said he was fed up with 19th-century dramas with bonnets". Says Wheen: "I explained, unsuccessfully, that there aren't many bonnets in the Marx story."

Wheen's ideal casting? "Johnny Depp and [his wife] Vanessa Paradis."