Christopher McQuarrie to Direct Netflix’s ‘The Chameleon,’ Based on the Wildest ‘New Yorker’ Feature You’ll Ever Read

He’s not even done with the next Mission: Impossible movie yet, but Christopher McQuarrie already has his next movie lined up. He’s just signed on to develop and direct The Chameleon for Netflix, based on the New Yorker feature of the same name by David Grann, about a French con man who was a serial impersonator of missing kids. No, seriously. This is real.

Deadline reports that the movie will have a script by Wolf of Wall Street and The Sopranos scribe Terence Winter, and will also be produced by Winter, his wife Rachel Winter, McQuarrie, and Heather McQuarrie. The Chameleon is the fascinating, chilling true account of Frédéric Bourdin, a youthful looking French con man who impersonated various missing teens and posed as the missing brother of a San Antonio family for a spell in the mid 1990s. The story itself is weird and compelling and will probably be more The Silence of the Lambs or Making A Murderer than Catch Me If You Can. The story has already been made into a hair-raising 2012 documentary The Imposter that examined the personality of Bourdin and how a family became so taken in by his lies.

McQuarrie is the latest in a line of big-name directors to get snatched up by Netflix, lured by the streaming service’s laissez-faire attitude towards monitoring what kinds of stuff their directors make. Streaming vs. theater debate aside, because this is with Netflix, McQuarrie can get as weird with this story as he pleases.