Jeremy Renner is quite the busy boy. Not only is currently shooting The Avengers, but has an appearance in the next Mission: Impossible film already in the can and has recently signed up for The Bourne Legacy.
In-between all this, he has just started his own production company, and has started development on its first project – a bio-pic of acting legend Steve McQueen.
The proposed film will be based on the two biographies of McQueen written by Marshall Terrill-Portrait of an American Rebel and The Life and Legend of a Hollywood Icon. James Gray, writer/director of The Yards, is adapting the two books into a screenplay, but is not set to direct the film. Instead, music video and commercials director Ivan Zacharias has been tapped to direct what will be his feature film debut.
Coming out of the New York stage and live television scene of the 1950s, McQueen had his first starring role in the classic 1958 science-fiction film The Blob. His performances in such films as The Great Escape, Bullitt and others made him an icon of cool.
Now I’ll have to admit that I have not yet read either of Terrill’s books on McQueen, but tales of McQueen’s wild personal life are fairly legendary. I have talked to enough people who met him while he was in Phonexville, PA filming The Blob to know that while those stories are very probably true, he was also a pretty nice and good man. It seems to me that McQueen’s wild side is an outgrowth of a certain joie de vie that the actor had. Hopefully, the film will be able to capture that.
[…] Cross-posted from FilmBuffOnline. […]