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Elon Musk appears to be in every single place, so why not on the massive display screen, too? That’s the place audiences will discover him, or no less than a model of him, now that arthouse studio and demanding hit maker A24 has acquired the movie rights to adapt Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk biography, to be directed by auteur filmmaker Darren Aronofsky.
However vital and financially profitable biopics are a rarity in Hollywood, and the Musk biopic poses arguably a fair greater threat. Not solely is the tech billionaire nonetheless alive, with the ending of his real-life story but to be advised (making crafting a cinematic narrative tougher), however Musk himself is a extremely divisive and more and more alienating character, which might repel audiences. That’s very true after Musk endorsed an antisemitic put up on his X platform earlier this week.
After the endorsement triggered widespread condemnation, Apple, which Musk has said was one among his social community’s greatest advertisers, paused its promoting on the positioning. IBM has as well after its advertisements ran alongside antisemitic posts on the platform. Given this, one wonders if A24 and Aronofsky ought to transfer forward with the biopic in any respect. In the event that they do, listed below are some issues they need to take into accout based mostly on different tech CEO biopics.
1. The actor doesn’t have to seem like Elon Musk
Inside 4 years of Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ passing in 2011, two Hollywood movies got here out about his life. The primary was Jobs, the 2013 movie directed by Joshua Michael Stern, starring Ashton Kutcher. The second was Steve Jobs, the 2015 movie directed by Danny Boyle, starring Michael Fassbender.
When the casting for each movies was introduced, many thought Kutcher was a superb option to painting the Apple CEO as a result of Kutcher had an uncanny resemblance to a younger Steve Jobs. On the similar time, folks had been disillusioned that Fassbender had been solid as Jobs within the 2015 movie as a result of the 2 males didn’t have a lot of a bodily resemblance.
However when it got here to portraying the tech icon, it was Fassbender who hit it out of the park. Whereas he didn’t seem like Jobs, he captured Jobs’ persona to a level that Kutcher didn’t. Inside 5 minutes of watching Steve Jobs, you overlook that it’s Fassbender you’re watching and consider it’s the actual man.
In terms of portraying Musk, the actor’s potential to seize the controversial billionaire’s persona is extra essential than the visible likeness.
2. Origin tales are not often attention-grabbing. Don’t present us Musk’s whole life
Alfred Hitchcock mentioned that motion pictures are like life, however with all of the boring elements minimize out. Even when Musk is an attention-seeking, world-famous billionaire, we don’t have to see his whole life story portrayed on the display screen.
That is one more reason the 2013 Jobs movie wasn’t pretty much as good because the 2015 Steve Jobs movie. Jobs went too far into the previous—together with the Apple CEO’s school years. Steve Jobs minimize to the chase, starting with some of the pivotal moments in Jobs’ life: the disclosing of the Apple Macintosh. The movie didn’t present him founding Apple. There was no narrative have to.
So, in terms of making a Musk film, skip over the faculty years, the PayPal years, and even the Tesla years. Essentially the most drama-fueled elements of Musk’s public life have been the more moderen ones: his burgeoning efforts to take us to Mars and his scorched earth insurance policies after taking on Twitter. There’s been as a lot behind-the-scenes drama, if no more, at Twitter within the yr since Musk took over as there was in the course of the early years of Fb, which offered compelling theatrics for what could also be top-of-the-line biopics of latest reminiscence: The Social Community.
3. Hiring Aaron Sorkin to write down the screenplay by no means hurts
When motion pictures are based mostly on books, there’s a motive folks normally say “The guide was higher.” Movie diversifications don’t usually work nicely in the event that they adhere too rigidly to a guide’s construction, prose, or fashion. Aronofsky’s Musk movie will probably be based mostly on Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk biography, and although Isaacson is without doubt one of the greatest biographers alive, he’s not a screenwriter, and he possible didn’t write the guide with the display screen in thoughts.
That’s why it wouldn’t damage to convey Aaron Sorkin on board to write down the screenplay. Sorkin has tailored an Isaacson biography earlier than—Isaacson’s 2011 guide, Steve Jobs, which turned the 2015 movie of the identical title. The guide and the movie have little or no in widespread in terms of tone or construction, however Sorkin’s adaptation did the guide justice by capturing the essence of Jobs that Isaacson captured so nicely in his biography.
Sorkin additionally wrote the screenplay for the 2010 movie The Social Community, which was based mostly on the 2009 guide The Unintentional Billionaires by Ben Mezrich. Each the movie and the guide detailed the founding of Fb and the drama behind it. The Social Community is extensively thought-about top-of-the-line movies of the twenty first century, and definitely the perfect biopic. It went on to win a number of Academy Awards and Golden Globes, and a big a part of that’s as a result of the script was entrusted to a screenwriter who knew the way to translate a well-written biography right into a well-paced biopic by capturing the topic’s essence as a substitute of making an attempt to convey each chapter to the massive display screen.
4. Let Aronofsky be Aronofsky
Aronofsky is one of the most interesting directors working in mainstream Hollywood, together with his movies, like these of David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, or Sofia Coppola, identifiable just by their tone, topic, or fashion. Aronofsky followers know they’re normally in for a fucking bizarre film that’s darkish, psychologically advanced, and infrequently surreal. There’s the Noah‘s creation sequence, the Black Swan feathers scene, and just about any scene of The Fountain, simply to call a couple of.
Musk is a wild and contentious character, and even his detractors will be dramatic, so right here’s hoping A24 lets us see all these character traits portrayed in a very Aronofsky-ish manner, whether or not that entails peering right into a Musk fever dream of himself defeating Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg in a cage match, or some haunting visible of Musk straddling a SpaceX rocket to Mars a la Kong in Dr. Strangelove, as these of us left on a dying earth tear into one another on an unregulated X.
Aronofsky can also be nice at peering into the darkish psychology of his characters. Now that we’ve seen simply how reprehensible Elon Musks’s internal ideas are, it appears there’s no higher director than Aronofsky to convey the X proprietor’s darkish persona to life on the silver display screen.
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