There are a lot of eyebrow-raising moments in this interview with Chicago 10 director Brett Morgan, in which he announces that his next project will be a Courtney Love-approved documentary about Kurt Cobain. Some of it is cringe-worthy, some of it is intriguing, most of it is somewhat WTF? On the good side, it sounds like the film will incorporate some material we haven’t seen before:

…we’ll have the music of course but [also] his home movies. He did stop action animation, which I don’t know if anyone’s ever seen but I saw it and it’s fucking great. I mean it was crude and I’m gonna probably refine it, you know…

…but on the bad side…

I mean one of the things I think with all my movies, if I won the lottery last night you know, one day I’d love to open up a theme park like Disneyland with rides based on all my movies because I think that like when I did The Kid Stays in The Picture, to me it was like the Disneyland ride about Bob Evans. If Disneyland had a ride called Bob Evans The Kid Says in the Picture it’s that? When I did Chicago 10, I kept thinking this is a Chicago experience. This is like Space Mountain with like police coming out at you and whatnot. The same thing with Kurt Cobain, it’s what the Seattle music experience should be in a way. It’s going to be like this 3 dimensional visceral sort of sublime you know movie…ultimately I think the goal for that film is to make sort of a Catcher on the Rye for the next decade?

I love it that that last part is phrased as a question. Anyway, as wary as I am of the notion of a documentary modeled after a theme park ride seeking to usurp the greatest novel ever about teen alienation, I think I’m a little bit more troubled about a few statements Morgen makes which sound vaguely familiar. More after the jump.

…we’re going to make a film as if Kurt Cobain was making his autobiography…if you’re gonna do something on that subject that a lot of people are familiar with you gotta do something different and new and add something to the cannon of work and so I think what this film will do is really get inside Kurt’s head and sort of see the world from the inside out.

But…um…wasn’t that movie already made? In his Toronto Film Festival program guide notes for Kurt Cobain: About a Son, Thom Powers wrote, “director AJ Schnack has created something quite close to an autobiography of Kurt Cobain.” And in an interview with indieWIRE at the time of the film’s release, Schnack talked about how he approached dealing with such a “familiar” subject:

So the idea of stripping away everything that the audience could hold on to–the flannel, the cardigans, the performance footage, the bad early ’90s videotape archival footage–became very important to me. And this kind of visual imagery–the actual places where the man lived, his homes, the places he worked, went to school, played shows–the landscapes of nature and architecture and of human faces, seeing the world that Kurt saw, became an important way of re-introducing the audience to someone that they think they already know.

Obviously, two films about the same subject are going to have similarites. But I’m just struck by how closely the language that Morgen uses to describe his project––aside from all that Disneyland stuff––resembles the words used to describe Schnack’s movie, especially in terms of the notions of “autobiography” and “seeing the world from Kurt’s eyes.” Morgen says he wants to do something completely new, but it sounds as though he’s unaware that his completely new angle has already been done.

Via The Playlist.