Chris Rock to Direct a Martin Luther King Jr. Biopic With Steven Spielberg on Board to Produce

Chris Rock is stepping behind the camera to direct a biopic about the life of beloved activist Martin Luther King Jr., with Steven Spielberg on board to produce the film. Rock is in final talks to direct and produce the project, with Spielberg on board as executive producer. Universal Pictures is backing the biographical drama after optioning Jonathan Eig’s biography King: A Life.

Eig’s book has been called the definitive biography of the late civil rights icon. It uses new FBI information and hundreds of interviews to paint a portrayal of King as a “courageous but emotionally troubled individual who demanded peaceful protest while grappling with his own frailties and a government that hunted him.” Since it’s early in the development process, casting has not been announced.

Rock, a four-time Emmy and three-time Grammy winner, previously directed 2014’s Top Five, 2003’s Head of State, and 2007’s I Think I Love My Wife. He’ll be seen in director George C. Wolfe’s Rustin, starring Colman Domingo as the civil rights activist.

Here’s the description of the book:

The first full biography in decades, King mixes revelatory and exhaustive new research with brisk and accessible storytelling to forge the definitive life for our times.

Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig’s A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.―and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. He casts fresh light on the King family’s origins as well as MLK’s complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father―as well as the nation’s most mourned martyr.

In this landmark biography, Eig gives us an MLK for our a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, and a committed radical who led one of history’s greatest movements, and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime.

via: Variety