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Variety reports that renowned war photographer Robert Capa, 1913-1954, is going to have his story told on film by director Michael Mann for Columbia Pictures.

In 1935 Capa, born Andre Friedmann, was a refugee from fascist Hungary when he met photographer Gerde Taro, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. they lived together in Paris with Capa teaching Taro about photography. The two came up with the Robert Capa persona for Friedmann and he began to sign his photographs with that name. Taro went on to become a frontline photographer during the Spanish Civil War. The movie will be about their two year romance which ended when Taro was killed in 1937 during the Battle of Brunete.

The film is based on “Waiting for Robert Capa” a novel by Spanish author Susana Fortes. Jez Butterworth has written the adaptation of the Spanish language novel.

Mann has wanted to make a film about Capa for a long time and finally found a way to dramatize the photographer’s life using the novelization of his love affair with Taro. Capa was killed in 1954 when he went on assignment to photograph the war in Indochina. He stepped on a landmine and died in a field hospital.

A new exhibit of photographs taken by Capa and Taro of the Spanish Civil War will be on display at the Manhattan International Center of Photography in fall 2010.

No word on casting yet, and the major question remains on how Mann will deal with Capa’s allegedly faking of a picture that became one of his most famous – his “Falling Soldier” (which is conveniently the header of this very article).

What do you think?