New Girl and Furious screenwriter Liz Meriwether has been doing all the things one does when preparing for a biopic on one of the world’s most famous pop icons. She’s listening to the Michelle Williams-read audiobook of Britney Spears‘ 2023 The Woman in Me memoir, and, in news that should warm the hearts of the Britney Army, she is seemingly doing a deep dive into Brit’s music, at least as evidenced by which tracks she told The Hollywood Reporter are her current favorites from the singer’s nine-LP catalog.
Meriwether spoke to the magazine about the task of adapting the tell-all into a film and though details of what the movie will look, and sound like are scarce, she did delve into her prep for the project that will team her with the creative hive mind behind the pair of hit Wicked films, director Jon M. Chu and producer Marc Platt; Universal has not yet confirmed any details about the adaptation.
Meriwether told THR that it’s still early in the process, but she’s spoken to Chu and Platt “so much” already and found them to be very collaborative. “I’m so used to being the final word on everything,” she said of her frequent dual roles in the past as writer and showrunner. “But it feels really relaxing at the moment because I’m writing something and I don’t have to be the one to figure this out … I get to just be a writer and that’s fun.”
She noted that she’s both read the hard copy and listened to The Woman in Me audiobook “multiple times,” praising her former Dying For Sex collaborator Michelle Williams for just crushing the audiobook read. “Michelle is unbelievable. It’s like a monologue. I told her that her performance of the audiobook broke my heart in so many ways,” she said. “She’s being true to Britney and also telling a story in the way she’s reading it. Another spoiler: Michelle’s a really good actor. Maybe I’ll turn a script in to Mark and Jon that’s just Michelle on a stage, reading. I wonder what will happen.”
Spears’ plainspoken memoir traces her career from her humble beginnings in Louisiana to her rise to pop superstardom in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It tackles her often contentious relationship with her family head-on, as well as her tabloid catnip romance with then-*NSYNC superstar Justin Timberlake and the public mental health struggles that led a 13-year stint in a tightly controlled conservatorship she fought for years. The book was a bestseller and the Williams-read audiobook became the fastest-selling in publisher Simon & Schuster’s history.
Meriwether said she’s also been listening to Spears’ music “a lot,” as well as the other music that was released during the years Spears was making albums; since getting out of the restrictive 13-year conservatorship in Nov. 2021, Spears has vowed not to return to the music business and has not released any new songs since her July 2023 one-off with Will.i.am “Mind Your Business.”
“I want to just get the feeling that moment in time or just remind myself,” said Meriwether of her musical deep-dive. “I’m exactly Britney’s age, so a lot of that music just takes me, like, immediately back.”
And, in a detail that should make Spears’ legion of fans happy, Meriwether has also been doing a serious excavation into Brit’s catalog to get into the mood. While making playlists of her favorites, she couldn’t point to a single song, but nodded to two deep tracks from late-period Britney as her current go-tos. She’s said she’s been loving the emotionally turbulent love triangle tale “Perfume” (from 2013’s Britney Jean), as well as the fan-favorite electropop banger “If I’m Dancing,” which appeared on the singer’s most recent, and possibly final album, 2016’s Glory.
“She’s made a lot of albums,” Meriwether said. “Her hits have been such big hits that I think there are a lot of songs that people don’t think of.”
