The director of the upcoming Britney Spears biopic has teased that they now have an “initial conception” of the story the film will tell.
It was announced by Universal Pictures in August that Spears’ best-selling 2023 memoir The Woman In Me would serve as the basis for a new biographical film about the popstar, and Jon M. Chu (In The Heights, Crazy Rich Asians) had signed on as director.
Now, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Chu has revealed that although there is yet to be a writer attached to the project, they have now reached an agreement about the movie’s overall shape.
“In this initial conception, I think it’s a lot about how we treat people, young people, stars that we think we own, women, mothers,” he said.
Britney Spears. Credit: Gareth Cattermole/Getty
Chu, who is also preparing to release his film Wicked on November 22, went on to express his excitement at being involved in the project. “I cannot talk much about the Britney story other than I have been a Britney fan for many years,” he explained. “I saw her when she was one of 12 acts at the Shrine Auditorium. I’ve gone to many of her shows, and she’s always been someone I’ve looked up to. She represents a generation of people growing up in the 2000s and late ‘90s, and she has a story that deserves to be told properly. There’s a lot about us in it.”
Despite the project having already been announced, Spears herself caused confusion in September when she seemed to imply that the “secret project” she was working on with Chu was in fact not a biopic of her life, but a “fictional musical”.
“You’ll have to ask Britney what she meant by all of that,” Chu said when asked about that post. “But she wrote my name in one of her Instagrams or tweets. That’s an honor. I love that. I think she likes to tease the audience in different ways. So I’ll let it be a mystery on her part, but I’m excited to work with her.”
The Woman In Me was a huge success upon release and has sold over 2.5million copies in the US alone, and shifted a million copies worldwide in its first week in October last year. Meanwhile, the audiobook — narrated by Hollywood star Michelle Williams, with an introduction by Spears — is the fastest-selling in publisher Simon & Schuster’s history.
The book contained a number of notable revelations in its candid discussion of her career, relationships, 13-year conservatorship and personal experiences. One of the most significant was that she had an abortion while dating Justin Timberlake between 1998 to 2002 because he thought they “weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives” and were “way too young”.
Earlier this week, an interview with Jonathan Ross from 2016 in which Spears discussed the conservatorship surfaced online for the first time, after her team had prevented it from airing at the time.
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