OK, earlier today, you probably read from us that Courtney Love was fired from “Fight Club.” The rocker, singer, actress, and former member of grunge band Hole claims she had the lead role of Marla Singer in the David Fincher film (the part that Helen Bonham Carter played). But during this casting process, she apparently went “nuclear” on Brad Pitt for proposing he star in a Kurt Cobain film directed by Gus Van Sant, and then Pitt got her fired from the film (“I wouldn’t let Brad play Kurt,” Love said. “I don’t do Faust. Who the fuck do you think are?”).
Love claimed that Pitt’s been trying to make a Kurt Cobain movie for decades. “My friend Cameron Crowe [told me] Brad Pitt was put on this earth to stalk you for Kurt, which has been going on since ’96,” she maintained.
But with time and distance, Love has changed her mind. In the late aughts, circa 2010, filmmaker Oren Moverman (“Time Out of Mind”) came close to making a Kurt Cobain film in the early 2000s. He was officially in talks at one point—Love was on board because she has to approve all these things— and he wrote a screenplay. But the filmmaker told us in a 2011 interview that he eventually left the project. Moverman, who already wrote unusual, and form-busting rock biopic screenplays for Bob Dylan (“I’m Not There”) and Beach Boys’ singer Brian Wilson (“Love & Mercy”)— said the script was “deeply unconventional,” the studio passed on it. Love was “heartbroken” when he left the project (read that whole interview here).
We digress. Love clearly wants to make a Kurt Cobain film now and said she has the perfect filmmaker in Todd Phillips, but he eventually passed. Love first revealed that a documentary about her is being made—seemingly not a traditional cradle-to-grave one and more about the making of her upcoming record—and then segued into her Todd Phillips story, apparently loving him for many of his works, but mainly what he and Joaquin Phoenix did on “Joker.”
“I wanted Todd Phillips to do [the] Kurt [Cobain] movie,” she said. “I felt like if anybody could handle Kurt, if he could handle Joaquin in that f*cking situation and not die, either of them…[then he could handle the Cobain movie].”
“I bugged him about doing Kurt; I didn’t feel like anybody else [could do it]. Him I trust,” she continued. “He thought about it, he really did, but I can’t compete with Joaquin [and ‘Joker 2’]. Anyway, he was incredibly considerate. But he said, ‘I don’t have the bandwidth.’”
Love also said she asked Phillips to produce the Cobain film, but he came up with the same answer: not enough bandwidth. She did say that Phillips would executive produce her upcoming documentary, so that’s something at least.
Later in the podcast, Love, she named dropped Warner Bros. chiefs Michael DeLuca and Pam Abdy as the pair she would make the film with. Phillips obviously already has a home at Warner Bros. with his “Joker” film and the “Hangover” trilogy, so it sounds like if/when Love does make that, it’ll be set up at WB.
Listen to the entire Maron conversation below.