EXCLUSIVE: Actress and model Dree Hemingway (Starlet) is set to executive-produce a new film about her legendary great grandfather, Ernest Hemingway.
The Hemingway Files will follow the writer’s last years, as his closest friends A.E. Hotchner and Duke MacMullen help him navigate his deepening mental struggles, his strained relationship with his trans daughter Gloria Hemingway, and the growing paranoia surrounding his belief that the FBI, under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, was watching him.
The film is produced by Jeremy Bolt (Resident Evil) and will be directed by Jessica M. Thompson, whose projects include SXSW-winning debut The Light Of The Moon, Screen Gems thriller The Invitation, which made $38M global, and Showtime series The End.
The project is being produced under JB Pictures. Script comes from Cory Todd Hughes and Adrian Speckert (Armor). The film is currently in development with casting discussions underway.
Hemingway is the totemic U.S. author, Nobel Prize winner and larger-than-life personality known for novels including The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell To Arms, For Whom The Bell Tolls and The Old Man And The Sea.
Dree Hemingway, who has starred in films including Sean Baker’s Starlet and Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young, said: “My great grandfather’s story has been told many times but rarely with this level of empathy and honesty. The Hemingway Files is about understanding him not as an icon, but as a father, a friend, and a man trying to hold on to himself.”
“This is one of the most important scripts of our lives,” Hughes and Speckert said in a joint statement. “Dree Hemingway’s support and trust in this project mean the world to us. We feel a deep responsibility to tell the truth of what Hemingway endured in those last years, his battles with his mind, his government, and his heart. The world deserves to know who he really was beneath the myth.”
Director Jessica M. Thompson said her vision is to approach Hemingway’s decline “with empathy and honesty. I want to peer underneath the mask of Hemingway’s legend and lay bare the truth of this multifaceted artist. I’m fascinated by the intersection of myth and reality. Hemingway’s story isn’t just about a writer grappling with obsolescence, it’s about the cost of masculinity, the fragility of family, and the truth that even the strongest among us can struggle.”
Several screen projects have explored Hemingway’s life, including the 2012 HBO film Hemingway & Gellhorn, the 2015 movie Papa: Hemingway in Cuba and 2021 Ken Burns documentary series, Hemingway.
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