Yeah: watch the movie.

You need to know what other people have done with the same material. If you end up doing something similar, ignorance is not an excuse.

You need to watch lots of similar movies, in fact. It'll help you understand what works and what doesn't.

Look, if you have a strong, original vision for the project, that will come through and you won't be unduly influenced by the other film.

If you don't, not watching the film isn't going to make your work non-derivative.

My advice is that if you're a complete novice then don't write a biopic! It's one of the hardest formats, and I have the greatest respect for writers who can pull it off. If you're new to screenwriting, then standard genres are all easier to tackle.

The problem with biopics is that with most famous people there's simply too much material out there, and cutting it down in a way that is both dramatically satisfying and true to the person in question without including every single detail and making a four-hour-long movie is really, really difficult (unless a long movie like "Gandhi" or "Lawrence of Arabia" is your goal). And the research involved can be very daunting.

But, if you insist, I would watch every highly-rated biopic you can out there too see how they deal with these issues. Smarter people than you or I have figured out great ways to work this stuff out.

Two standard tricks are:

* Make the story about a defining moment in their life.
* For a fuller life story, skip around a lot and only hit the high notes.

And then there's a movie like "32 Short Films About Glen Gould," one of the most satisfyingly unconventional biopics made. It sort of follows the second model, but doesn't bother to establish continuity between the events.

Good luck.