Steve Bannon in talks to make a Western in Hollywood

STEVE BANNON, the former chief strategist to President Donald Trump, is reportedly keen on making a Hollywood Western.

Mr Bannon, a former film producer, was said to have held meetings with production companies. One Hollywood source told the New York Post: “The Western thing actually makes sense when you consider his strategy with Trump. Maybe he thinks there’s an untapped market for movies about John Wayne-style alpha males.”

Mr Bannon resigned from the White House last month and returned to his previous role running Breitbart, the news website supportive of Mr Trump’s agenda.

Two decades ago he was an executive producer involved with films including Titus, starring Anthony Hopkins, and The Indian Runner, starring Viggo Mortensen and Patricia Arquette. Mr Bannon also made a series of political documentaries, and was an investor in the hit TV sitcom Seinfeld.

A possible return to Hollywood would put him at odds with the views of the majority of film industry figures.

This week he began a war of words with George Clooney, who called Mr Bannon “a little wannabe writer who would do anything in the world to have had a script made in Hollywood”.

Speaking at the Toronto Film Festival, Clooney called a Bannon script “one of the worst I’ve ever read”.

The script in question was a hip-hop musical set against the backdrop of the 1992 Los Angeles riots and loosely based on Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.

Mr Bannon responded: “I don’t need to be lectured by a bunch of limousine liberals from the Upper East Side of New York and from the Hamptons.”

There have been suggestions, as yet unconfirmed, that Mr Bannon will speak next month at Berkeley, the liberal California college. Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart editor, spoke there this week, and a Berkeley spokesman estimated security costs for that event may have been up to $600,000 (£442,000).