Financing for a film that would look at the life of Blob star Steve McQueen, appropriately titled McQueen, is starting to come together, according to a report from Deadline.

The film is the project of The Immigrant director James Gray and could possibly feature Gray’s Immigrant star Jeremy Renner in the title role, though Deadline states that both Channing Tatum and Ryan Gosling have expressed interest in the part in the past.

The film will be based in part on on the 2010 biography Steve McQueen: The Life And Legend Of A Hollywood Icon, written by Marshall Terrill and ” a unique story that is being kept under wraps about McQueen’s life that he wrote about at the time of his death in his own hand,” according to Deadline.

In a quote to Deadline, producer Graham Kaye stated –

[There is a diary] that was kept by his nurse in Mexico who gave it to the author of the book that was done on him by Marshall Terrill. Something happened in McQueen’s life that has been kept secret for a long time. We think we have a very interesting way into this story.

No screenwriter has been hired yet for the project.

Jeremy Renner is quite the busy boy. Not only is currently shooting The Avengers, but has an appearance in the next Mission: Impossible film already in the can and has recently signed up for The Bourne Legacy.

In-between all this, he has just started his own production company, and has started development on its first project – a bio-pic of acting legend Steve McQueen.

The proposed film will be based on the two biographies of McQueen written by Marshall Terrill-Portrait of an American Rebel and The Life and Legend of a Hollywood Icon. James Gray, writer/director of The Yards, is adapting the two books into a screenplay, but is not set to direct the film. Instead, music video and commercials director Ivan Zacharias has been tapped to direct what will be his feature film debut.

Coming out of the New York stage and live television scene of the 1950s, McQueen had his first starring role in the classic 1957 science-fiction film The Blob. His performances in such films as The Great Escape, Bullitt and others made him an icon of cool.

Now I’ll have to admit that I have not yet read either of Terrill’s books on McQueen, but tales of McQueen’s wild personal life are fairly legendary. I have talked to enough people who met him while he was in Phonexville, PA filming The Blob to know that while those stories are very probably true, he was also a pretty nice and good man. It seems to me that McQueen’s wild side is an outgrowth of a certain joie de vie that the actor had. Hopefully, the film will be able to capture that.

Cross-posted from FilmBuffOnline.