Luca Guadagnino To Direct An Audrey Hepburn Biopic Starring Rooney Mara
Luca Guadagnino certainly likes to stay busy. The acclaimed Italian director is still in post-production on his upcoming romance-horror film "Bones and All" (reuniting him with his "Call Me By Your Name" star Timothée Chalamet) but has already lined up multiple projects to tackle next. The latest addition to his to-do list? A film biopic about the Oscar-winning Hollywood icon Audrey Hepburn.
According to Variety, Guadagnino is set to direct the movie for Apple, with Michael Mitnick ("The Giver," "The Current War") writing the script and Rooney Mara starring as Hepburn, on top of serving as a producer. Guadagnino and Mara are also tentatively set to collaborate on a BBC miniseries adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's classic novel "Brideshead Revisited," which would further reunite Mara with her "Carol" and "Nightmare Alley" co-star Cate Blanchett (assuming the cast comes together as intended).
A dancer and theater actor turned big screen starlet, Hepburn starred in such famous movies as "My Fair Lady," "Roman Holiday," "Breakfast at Tiffany's," and "Wait Until Dark" before semi-retiring from acting in the late 1960s. However, she would later work on a handful of films in the '70s and '80s, culminating with her last screen appearance in director Steven Spielberg's 1989 fantasy drama "Always." Hepburn was also a devoted humanitarian for a good chunk of her life, even before being appointed a Goodwill Ambassador of UNICEF in 1989.
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Biopics, especially those about famous actors, are admittedly a dicey prospect, no matter who's making them. As /Film's Kayleigh Donaldson wrote about in her feature, "Why Biopics Are Bad For Acting," they too often lead people to conflate a vivid imitation of a real-life person whose mannerisms are well-documented with being a subtle or nuanced performance, be that the case or not. Not only that, they're infamous for doing little more than running through the biggest events in their subject's life like a glorified book report, providing little in the way of insight beyond what you could've learned by merely reading their Wikipedia page.
All that being said, Guadagnino is an intriguing pick to direct an Audrey Hepburn biopic. As a director, he tends to make movies that are all about people really sitting with their emotions and desires. Even his "Suspiria" re-imagining is as much a film about its characters' feelings and states of mind as it is one about a coven of witches secretly running a dance academy. In other words, there's reason to stay hopeful that his Hepburn memoir (assuming it comes to pass) will have more in common with Pablo Larraín's ruminative "Spencer" than a more conventional biopic.
Guadagnino's "Bones and All" has yet to receive a release date but, by the look of it, may arrive later this year.