Deadline has revealed that Dallas Buyers Club and Big Little Lies director Jean-Marc Vallee is set to direct a biopic of music icon John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono, which is in development at Immersive Pictures and Universal Pictures.
The film will tell the story of Lennon and Ono’s relationship, and is aiming to present “a celebration and journey of a couple”. The project has been written by Anthony McCarten, who has penned the Freddie Mercury and Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody as well as the acclaimed The Theory of Everything and Darkest Hour, while Vallee and McCarten are set to produce alongside Michael De Luca, Josh Bratman, Nathan Ross and Yoko Ono herself.
“We are all huge Beatles fans, and this is a dream come true,” said producer Ross. “There were inner and outer struggles John had, and family turmoil as a child, and things she had to endure before John’s tragic death. The thing we loved about the script was its stark honesty. You see so many biopic scripts where you can see that the cooperation of the subject’s family had something to do with the editorial, and that wasn’t the case here.”
“We’ll have to make a deal for the music, but with Yoko producing with us, we’ll have access to the estate and the library of songs,” added De Luca. “I’ve been listening to John’s songs forever, but as we developed the movie, I became aware of just how profound is the emotional impact of the music and their legacy is on me.”
Vallee and McCarten are set to work on a new draft of the script, with a view to beginning principal photography late in 2019.
