The Theory of Everything writer signs up for new movie
McCarten took on the project and has since spent time interviewing Gibb.
Anthony McCarten has signed on to write Paramount's upcoming movie about The Bee Gees.
The London-based scribe (The Darkest Hour, The Theory of Everything) says he was recruited for the film by producer Graham King a few months ago, after they had worked on Bohemian Rhapsody, which won four Oscars in February.
"I was walking in Hyde Park and Graham called and said, 'What are you up to?' and I said, 'Walking in Hyde Park with my lovely wife,'" McCarten tells. "He said, 'Would you be interested in working on this project with Barry [Gibb] and Steven Spielberg?"
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McCarten took on the project and has since spent time interviewing Gibb, the lone surviving member of the band.
"I've flown down to Miami and had two long meetings with Barry," he says. "The way that you work, it's a partnership and you join hands, and I always try to make them aware very early on that this is not a photograph, it's a painting. It's impressionistic by its very nature and I have to be given room to move, and there may be aspects that you struggle with but if we leave those out, it'll be dramatically inert and do you want a bad movie?"
McCarten, who penned Netflix's upcoming movie The Two Popes, says he understands the nervousness that his real-life subjects felt about telling their stories on the big screen. With 2014's The Theory of Everything, he says he spent time with Stephen Hawking and his wife Jane, persuading them to let him write their story.
McCarten tells his subjects that his scripts "will tend towards the light, as your life has, and we're not going to make light of all the other things in the way, the stumblings and the obstacles and your mistakes, that's what makes us human and what makes us interesting, and if we leave that out, it'll be bland."
