'She Said' Will Let Carey Mulligan And Zoe Kazan Take Down Harvey Weinstein
The Harvey Weinstein scandal sent shockwaves through Hollywood when The New York Times broke the story in 2017 – not necessarily because of the sexual nature of the crimes Weinstein allegedly committed, but because a high-powered producer was actually being forced to suffer consequences in an industry that often looked the other way. Now the story of Weinstein's downfall is coming to the big screen in a new movie from Universal Pictures.
Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan are in negotiations to play Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, the journalists who broke the story in the NYT, in a film called She Said, which is based on the duo's book She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement.
Deadline reports that Unorthodox director Maria Schrader will be directing She Said, which will be written by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, who led the writers room for Steve McQueen's acclaimed Small Axe. Lenkiewicz also wrote the Rachel Weisz/Rachel McAdams movie Disobedience, the Keira Knightley drama Colette, and the screenplay for the Polish drama Ida, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2014.
Mulligan, who recently starred in Promising Young Woman, has worked with Kazan (The Big Sick, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs) three times in the past: once on the Broadway stage in 2008; later when she starred in Wildlife, a 2018 drama which Kazan co-wrote; and again in a 2015 web series called The Walker. This will be their first time acting with each other in the same movie.
Could This End Up Among the All-Time Great Films About Journalism?
Despite the enormity of the Weinstein story and his horrific crimes, Deadline says "the thrust of the film isn't Weinstein or his scandal. This is about an all-women team of journalists who persevered through threats of litigation and intimidation, to break a game-changing story, told in a procedural manner like Spotlight and All the President's Men." By putting the focus on the actual work of compiling this story – fact-checking and securing comments on the record about a topic that was an open secret in Hollywood for years – this has the potential to frame this as one of the all-time great journalism movies, in the pantheon alongside films like The China Syndrome, Shattered Glass, Zodiac, and Network.
Megan Ellison will produce the movie for Annapurna Pictures, while Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner, and Jeremy Kleiner will produce for Plan B. Those folks don't typically get involved with projects that turn out poorly, so I'm crossing my fingers that this will turn out to be genuinely great.