Charlize Theron to play Phillip K. Dick’s dead twin in new Alfonso Cuarón movie

Alfonso Cuarón is set to direct a movie about renowned sci-fi author Phillip K. Dick, but it hardly sounds like a traditional biopic. Titled Jane, the movie will instead focus on Dick’s twin sister who died shortly after being born and whose death “affected Dick personally and also influenced his creative work.” This all comes from The Hollywood Reporter, which says that Charlize Theron is going to star as Jane and that Dick’s daughter Isa Hackett will serve as a producer on the project.

Obviously there are going to be some creative liberties taken here, since you have an adult woman playing a real person who died as a newborn, and the Hollywood Reporter says Jane will be a “moving, suspenseful, and darkly humorous story about a woman’s unique relationship with her brilliant-but-troubled twin.” The film will involve Jane “attempting to rescue her brother from predicaments both real and imagined” as she “plunges deeper and deeper into a fascinating world of his creation.” So it’s about Dick’s life, but it’s not necessarily about his real life—whatever that may mean.

In a statement, Hackett said that the movie “will defy the conventions of a biopic and embrace the alternative reality Philip K. Dick so desperately desired—one in which his beloved sister survived beyond six weeks of age.” Hackett adds that Jane is “her story” and that it’s “her lens through which we will see him and his imagination.”

Dick’s work is huge in Hollywood, with his books and stories having been adapted (with varying degrees of authenticity) into Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, The Man In The High Castle, Next, The Adjustment Bureau, and many more. This will be Cuarón’s first foray into the Phillip K. Dick universe, even if it is sort of a tangential alternate universe, and it will be produced by Amazon.