Chet Baker Biopic: IFC To Release Movie Based On Legendary Jazz Musician Starring Ethan Hawke [VIDEO]
The Chet Baker biopic starring Ethan Hawke has finally found a distributor.
IFC will be releasing the film, Born to Be Blue, which has been written and directed by Robert Budreau.
Budreau has made previously made another film about Baker, The Deaths of Chet Baker, which addressed the musician's mysterious death in Amsterdam in 1988. Born to Be Blue will explore the legendary jazz musician's troubled phase, which began at the end of the 1960s. This was when his heroine addiction started to get worse and he had great financial troubles. It also explores the musician's attempt to make a comeback, and the grievous attack on him after a gig which left him physically injured.
The rights for the movie were up for auction at the Toronto Film Festival at its world premiere in Special Presentations on Sept. 13.
An exclusive clip from the film was revealed earlier this year, which shows a couple of music executives being blown away by Chet Baker's, portrayed by Hawke, talent in a recording studio.
In a previous interview with the Los Angeles Times, Hawke dished about preparing for the part. "I spent the last six months practicing the ... trumpet and listening to Chet Baker and trying to be heroin-chic thin," he said.
In the interview, Hawke also revealed that Geoff Dyer's book But Beautiful was a big influence:
"That book is phenomenal. So I read it, and this guy Robert Budreau read it. And he thought, "What an idea. I'm going to take the legend of the person, the mythology and create a story about not as he was but how he could have been." And the dream of the movie is that by liberating ourselves from nonfiction, we get at an essence of who he really was.
Dino De Laurentiis approached Chet to have him play himself in his own movie. So we say: What if that had happened? So I'm playing Chet Baker playing himself in a movie. And our movie goes back and forth between the biopic we're making and the reality of it and this fictional affair Chet's having with his co-star (Carmen Ejogo), who's the actress playing my wife in the movie."
