Bille August to direct Karen Blixen biopic

Danish director Bille August will direct Tanne, a biopic of Danish author Karen Blixen (aka Isak Dinesen), who wrote Out of Africa.

Danish producer Regner Grasten will stage the $10-$12m (DKK 55m-65m) feature, which will shoot from early 2011.

Tanne follows Blixen’s life until 1913, when at age 28 she  boarded the ship for Africa, where she would live for 18 years. Grasten tried to get the rights to Blixen’s story 20 years ago, but the Rungstedlund Foundation, managing the Blixen heritage, thought they had already been licensed to Universal Pictures as part of the Out of Africa property. (Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa won seven Oscars in 1986.)

”We want to make a Danish film classic, about a great artist during a period in Denmark which should be immortalised,” says Grasten.

Danish playwright Peter Asmussen — co-writer of Breaking the Waves, well-known for his collaboration with Danish-Swedish director Simon Staho – has been hired to script the film.

Blixen’s Babette’s Feast became the source of Denmark’s first Oscar-winning feature (directed by Gabriel Axel). The following year, August’s Pelle the Conqueror (Pelle Erobreren) was named Best Foreign-Language Feature in 1989.

August’s most recent film was Goodbye Bafana, about the white prison guard who befriended Nelson Mandela.

The Karen Blixen Museum and the Rungstedlund Foundation have thoroughly researched the early years of Blixen’s life, and Asmussen and August will start working on the material in June. Financing is still being completed.