When Adam Driver signed on to make Jeff Nichols‘ Midnight Special earlier last decade, he wasn’t the star he is now. But despite Driver’s Star Wars fame and awards recognition for films such as Marriage Story, he’s re-teaming with Nichols for Yankee Comandante, an adaptation of David Grann‘s New Yorker article.
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 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 begin next year – at least right now.
Nichols and Driver adapting a Grann article should be recipe for success. Driver is coming off a banner year and Nichols has been a consistently good filmmaker, at the helm of movies such as Take Shelter and Mud.
And Grann has consistently written great articles that have been adapted into excellent films. His book The Lost City Of Z was turned into James Gray‘s 2016 movie of the same name, while he also wrote the article that inspired David Lowery‘s The Old Man & The Gun. His book Killers Of The Flower Moon has Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro attached for the adaptation.
Hopefully Yankee Comandante can hit the heights of prior Grann adaptations – except for the awful Jim Carrey movie Dark Crimes; read Grann’s article instead unless you’re just that interested in Carrey attempting a polish accent. With Driver and Nichols aboard, this should become a highly anticipated project. Hopefully we don’t have to wait too long to eventually see it.
#Peace.Love.YankeeComandante
