After working together on 2016’s sci-fi movie Midnight Special, Adam Driver and writer-director Jeff Nichols are re-teaming for an adaptation of David Grann‘s New Yorker article Yankee Comandante, reports Variety.
Published in May 2012, “The Yankee Comandante” outlines how two people rose to the rank of “comandante” during the Cuban Revolution. One was Che Guevara, and the other was a white man from Ohio.
Nichols will direct from his own screenplay, and Imperative Entertainment and 30 West are currently shopping the project to select studios, with production slated to start next year once the COVID-19 pandemic has calmed down a bit and it’s deemed safe to resume production.
Driver has already seen one of his films halted in its tracks due to the ongoing pandemic, as Ridley Scott‘s The Last Duel was forced to suspend production. The period drama also stars Matt Damon, Jodie Comer and Ben Affleck, and it was hard enough to get everyone’s schedules to line up in the first place.
Driver is coming off a banner year in which he earned an Oscar nomination for his incredible performance in Marriage Story and drew strong reviews for his turn in Amazon’s The Report before reprising his role as Kylo Ren in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Driver probably would’ve won Best Actor had he not run into the force of nature that was Joaquin Phoenix‘s performance in Joker.
Meanwhile, Grann has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2003, and his work has served as the basis of several movies in just the last few years. His book The Last City of Z was turned into the 2016 movie of the same name starring Charlie Hunnam, Robert Pattinson and Tom Holland, and he also wrote the articles that inspired the Robert Redford movie The Old Man & the Gun, the Jim Carrey thriller Dark Crimes, and the Laura Dern–Jack O’Connell drama Trial by Fire.
