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Steve Jobs biopic director, Danny Boyle, was left in a trance of “grief” after David Bowie refused to let the filmmaker use his music for a musical he’d planned about the cultural icon’s life.
After spending several years crafting a script with London Olympics collaborator Frank Cottrell Boyce for a film about Bowie’s career, the pair were forced to abandon the project after Bowie refused to lend any of his music to it.
The Slumdog Millionaire director recently spoke with The Radio Times about the devastating news. He said that Bowie’s rejection and dismissal of the film had left him reeling “in grief” and that while he was eager “to direct a musical”, it wasn’t going to be in the traditional format.
He told the magazine that he took on his most recent biopic, Steve Jobs – a drama based around the late Apple chief executive – to “fill the space in my heart left by the abandoned Bowie script.”
In another interview back in October, Boyle spoke about his plans for the Bowie film. “It’s a wonderful script, by Frank Cottrell Boyce. It’s a sort of musical, but we couldn’t get the music rights ... So, we had to put it away for the moment.”
The possibility of the project ever seeing the light of day is completely in David Bowie's hands, but Boyle told the Happy Sad Confused podcast that he hoped to bring it back from the dead one day. “I’d love to do this film,” he said. “It’s not really a musical, but it is, so we’ll see.”
This isn't the first time Boyle has tried to get Bowie involved with his work, either. The film-maker was unable to get the music icon to appear in the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics, while Bowie’s album Low apparently inspired Boyle's 2013 thriller, Trance.
Apparently, David Bowie will be dropping his brand new album on 9 January. Keep your fingers crossed.
Check out the trailer for Steve Jobs below
