Bar­ry Jenk­ins is dra­ma­tiz­ing a goril­la con­ser­va­tion doc for Netflix

With every­one con­fined to their home quar­an­tines, the film indus­try has gone on a glob­al hia­tus, though that’s most­ly in terms of pro­duc­tion. Some ele­ments can con­tin­ue in iso­la­tion, such as the already-soli­tary process of writ­ing; any film­mak­er with the moti­va­tion and cre­ative ener­gy to work dur­ing these long and tedious days would do well to have a screen­play or two ready to go once the glo­ri­ous machine of show­biz gets a‑grinding once again.

Bar­ry Jenk­ins has the right idea, judg­ing from a new exclu­sive run­ning yes­ter­day on Dead­line. The not­ed direc­tor of Moon­light and If Beale Street Could Talk will use some of the new­found time on his hands to draw up a script for a drama­ti­za­tion of Virun­ga, a 2014 doc­u­men­tary about nature con­ser­van­cy, for pro­duc­ing bod­ies Net­flix and Leonar­do DiCaprio. (Jenk­ins has not been attached to direct.)

DiCaprio stepped in as exec­u­tive pro­duc­er for the orig­i­nal film, a reveal­ing look into the efforts of four fig­ures to com­bat goril­la poach­ing in a Con­golese nation­al park. Their inter­con­nect­ed cam­paign touch­es on mul­ti­ple hot-but­ton issues at play in the area, fore­most among them the prospect of oil drilling in lands ded­i­cat­ed to the splen­dor of bio­di­ver­si­ty. It earned Net­flix an Oscar nom­i­na­tion ear­ly in their march towards legit­i­ma­cy as a stu­dio, and now they’re hop­ing it can be spun into a block­buster court­ing the demo­graph­ic of view­ers who won’t watch documentaries.

The struc­ture would seem to lend itself well to the Hol­ly­wood treat­ment, divid­ed as it is between four com­pelling char­ac­ters: goril­la care­giv­er André, sec­tor war­den Rodrigue, his over­seer Emmanuel, and inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist Mélanie. The doc­u­men­tary con­tains the com­bi­na­tion of action and pathos that pricks up stu­dio exec­u­tive ears, and with a polit­i­cal edge that lends every­thing an air of Importance.

The jump from non­fic­tion to nar­ra­tive forms has not always been a grace­ful one, but if any­one can man­age it, it’s prob­a­bly the guy who fig­ured out how to trans­port James Baldwin’s lyri­cal prose from the page to the screen. If noth­ing else, we can be sure that the new Virun­ga will have empa­thy and com­pas­sion to spare.