Variety reports that Steven Spielberg has begun talks with Liam Neeson to play president Abraham Lincoln as he steers the North to victory in the Civil War. The plan is for the long-in-the-works biopic to start production next January. The most recent screenwriter on the script is Paul Webb.
The trade adds that Spielberg won't complete principal photography on War of the Worlds until late March. Post-production will be rigorous, as he and star Tom Cruise gear for a June 29 release.
The DreamWorks movie will be based on a bio being written by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. That book will be published next fall, under the title "The Uniter: The Genius of Abraham Lincoln."
Neeson, who received a Golden Globe nomination for Kinsey and next appears in Kingdom of Heaven and Batman Begins, earned an Oscar nomination for playing Oskar Schindler in Spielberg's Schindler's List.
A January 2006 start would delay further Spielberg's long-planned film about the aftermath of the 1972 Munich Olympics, where members of the Israeli team were held hostage and slain by Palestinian terrorists.
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