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David Bowie and Iggy Pop’s Shared ‘Lust For Life’ Biopic Slated for the Big Screen

david bowie, iggy pop, lust for life, biopic

David Bowie and Iggy Pop’s collaborations in 1970s West Berlin yielded some of the best work in their respective careers. That era birthed the first LP in Bowie’s “Berlin trilogy,” the “Sound and Vision”-featuring Low, as well as Iggy’s first two solo albums, The Idiot and Lust for Life. Now it looks like those sessions will produce another work — a movie examining the two icons’ partnership during that time.

The Hollywood Reporter notes that British producers Altered Image are teaming with the Berlin-based Egoli Tossell Film production company to bring Lust for Life, a “biopic” about Bowie and Iggy’s Berlin period, to the big screen. 

“[Lust for Life] is not a traditional rock biopic, for no one dies at the end,” Egoli Tossell said in a statement, adding that the film’s central character will actually be the city of West Berlin. Gabriel Range (Death of a President) will direct from a script by Robin French, who writes for the BBC comedy series Cuckoo. French’s screenplay reportedly draws from the biographies Starman: David Bowie and Open Up and Bleed: Iggy Pop, as well as a number of other sources. As of now, there’s no word whether the flick will feature songs by Bowie or Iggy, but hopefully the Thin White Duke will give the green light for his material, something he refused to do for 1998’s Velvet Goldmine, which focused on characters based on both Bowie and Iggy. (Then again, not being able to lock down musical rights hasn’t stopped the Jimi Hendrix movie starring André 3000.)

A film based on Iggy Pop’s tenure with the Stooges — who just wrapped their fifth album, by the way — was in the works years ago, with Elijah Wood set to star and Nick Gomez expected to direct. That project appears to be shelved, though, as Wood explained in a 2011 interview. “It’s one of those things, it was really honestly like, all a part of the difficulty of getting a movie financed and we had financing at one stage and it fell through,” he said. “I mean, it was six or seven years ago that I was attached to it. So I would be happy if it was resurrected.”

Bowie drew on his stint in Berlin for the lyric video to his recent single, “Where Are We Now?”, which will appear on The Next Day, Bowie’s first studio album in a decade (that may or may not have been predicted in a dream). The “classic” sounding Next Day — one of 50 Albums You Gotta Hear — drops March 12.