Joni Mitchell 'Squelched' a Biopic About Her Starring Taylor Swift

A couple of years ago, it was reported that Sheila Weller’s book Girls Like Us about Carole King, Carly Simon and Joni Mitchell was being turned into a movie where Joni would be played by Taylor Swift. Fear not: that possibility has been squashed by Mitchell.

Mitchell told 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,” Mitchell added, “assumptions, assumptions, assumptions.”

I liked Girls Like Us, but biopics tend to suck and Mitchell’s a pretty private person; she didn’t even agree to be interviewed for the original text itself. (In the book, Weller writes that when she was doing research, “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.” Later on Weller “made a concerted effort to interview Joni but was turned down (she was busy recording Shine, among other things)”.) Whether or not Mitchell’s interest in a film based off that same book would have changed if she wasn’t being played by one of the cast members of Valentine’s Day remains to be seen.