Captain Phillips director Paul Greengrass is set to go ahead with a biopic about Jimi Hendrix after the project’s producers, Legendary Pictures, made a deal with Hendrix’s rights-holders, Experience Hendrix, to use original recordings. Greengrass had planned to make the film in 2010, but, according to Deadline magazine, his failure to secure those rights scuppered the project.
Now, however, a new script has been commissioned from Scott Silver, the writer of The Fighter and 8 Mile, to replace the Max Borenstein screenplay from the project’s first incarnation. Greengrass is expected to direct the film after completing work on the fifth Bourne film, currently in production with Matt Damon in the lead role. (This will be Damon’s fourth time playing Jason Bourne, and Greengrass’s third time directing, as neither were involved in 2012’s The Bourne Legacy, which was directed by Tony Gilroy and starred Jeremy Renner.) Anthony Mackie, who plays Falcon in the Captain America series, was in the frame to play Hendrix for Greengrass in 2010; it is not yet known if he will be cast in the role now that the project is back up and running.
Hendrix died in 1970 aged 27, after three groundbreaking albums with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and one live album, Band of Gypsys. Experience Hendrix was formed in 1995 by the musician’s father, Al Hendrix, to manage “the name, likeness, image and 100% of the music of Jimi Hendrix’s legacy”. The most recent film about Hendrix, All Is by My Side, written and directed by 12 Years a Slave’s John Ridley and starring André Benjamin, was not licensed to use Hendrix’s music, and it performed poorly at the box office.
