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We've seen a lot more of Taylor Swift ever since she's been riding high with her record-breaking album sales for "1989." However, we could have seen her on the big screen, too—in a Joni Mitchell biopic—if Mitchell hadn't put the brakes on the film.
Back in 2012, Swift (who's had acting roles in The Giver and Valentine's Day) was rumored to portray Mitchell (yes, a major singer-songwriter playing another major singer-songwriter) in the film adaption of Sheila Weller's 2008 book Girls Like Us . The biography followed the lives of three seminal female musicians—Mitchell, Carole King, and Carly Simon—whose careers rose in the 1960s. Opposite Swift would have been Mad Men's Jessica Pare starring as Simon and The Newsroom’s Alison Pill as King in the biopic.
However, it turns out Mitchell was behind the reason why the film didn't get made, and she wasn't too fond of being portrayed by Swift. Mitchell said in a recent interview with The Sunday Times (via NME ): "I squelched that! I said to the producer, ’All you’ve got is a girl with high cheekbones.’ It’s just a lot of gossip, you don’t have the great scenes. [...] There’s a lot of nonsense about me in books. Assumptions, assumptions, assumptions."
And there may be something to what Mitchell is saying, as Weller didn't interview her for her book. Actually, the only person of the three singer-songwriters Weller spoke to was Simon, and the rest of the details in her book came out of interviews with the musicians' friends, business associates and former flames, the New York Times reported .
In Girls Like Us , Weller writes about the reasons why Mitchell didn't speak to her ( via Jezebel ):
Joni sent word that she did not want to be grouped in a book with two others, but my access to her friends proved undiminished... Last summer I made a concerted effort to interview Joni but was turned down (she was busy recording Shine, among other things).
According to the Times, this is what Weller covered on Mitchell's life:
She traces Mitchell’s life from her childhood in Canada (during which she endured an overbearing mother and survived polio), through her years as a struggling folk singer (Mitchell gave up her child for adoption, although mother and daughter were reunited many years later), through her emergence as a widely admired (and rather temperamental) singer-songwriter.
