“Life Itself” is a film adaptation turned biographical documentary of prominent film critic Roger Ebert’s memoir of the same title. The film chronicles Ebert’s career and personal life through his death from cancer in April of 2013. Director Steve James sat down with The Eagle’s Mary Wright to discuss criticism, boundaries and Roger Ebert.
The Eagle: What primarily drew you to the project to make Life Itself?
Steve James: It was the memoir. Reading the memoir. I knew Roger was a great and important film critic. I loved his writing, but I don’t think I would’ve made the film if that was all the film was going to be about. The memoir just showed him to have had an extraordinary life. Starting from a small town in Illinois, going to the big city and sort of embracing it, all of its glory and messiness, and the drinking, the newspaper reporting and then falling into this job that he didn’t even seek. He transformed his life at least a couple of times. One was with the show [At the Movies], [Ebert and Gene Siskel] transformed film criticism, and then he helped transform criticism on the Internet when he became so devoted and a big voice on the Internet. He brought a level of legitimacy to Internet criticism and then with his far-flung correspondents on his website, he cultivated other voices.
E: How did you approach filming scenes that were really personal and intimate, such as the hospital scenes? Did you go about that process differently than you would other parts of the movie?
SJ: Yeah, they’re different in the sense that when we’re doing a sit down or formal interview with the various people that we interview in the movie. It’s a whole different process because we did some really serious lighting and setup. But I think with both, whether it’s an interview or whether it’s filming in a more vérité fashion in the hospital, my goal is always to have people be at ease with us being there and to be as small and intimate as we can be and not make a big deal of it because it isn’t a big deal. There were times with the hospital stuff where it felt best and right and even was asked for that it be just me shooting. I didn’t shoot most of the movie. I had this great D.P. [director of photography] named Dana Kupper who did most of it, but there were a few times where Roger and Chaz just wanted it just to be me. Not because they didn’t trust Dana, or anyone, it just felt better and they felt very vulnerable, especially around the illness stuff. They just wanted it to be me and that was different.
E: Do you think the film would have turned out differently or changed direction if Roger were able to be a part of the entire process?
SJ: The film would be different in one very dramatic way, which is that it wouldn’t be a film about a man dying. He would be alive at the end, which everyone wanted. It’s really interesting to speculate. What I typically do is that I show the film before it’s done to the main subjects with the promise that I will listen to what they have to say, but they have to have an understanding that I can’t give editorial control to them. I’ve done that for every film I’ve done and it’s always an interesting process. Sometimes it’s very intense and sometimes it’s not. I think in this case, trying to speculate on it, I don’t know. On the one hand I could see Roger engaging very avidly and saying, what about this moment and this scene, kind of putting that critic’s hat on. On the other hand I could also see him going, you know what it’s not really for me. If there were some factual problems in it he would point them out because he’s a journalist, but otherwise I could see him going, this is your portrait of me and Chaz and my life and if that’s what you see that’s what you see.
E: While the film is about Roger Ebert’s life, a lot of it did discuss film criticism in general. Do you see the role of the film critic as being as essential to the success of a movie or do you think it’s declining in comparison to how it used to be?
SJ: I don’t know if we’ll ever have a film critic as powerful as Roger again. The great thing about the power of his criticism and of his position was the way in which he used it. He used it not just to not just to talk about movies, big movies, good, bad or indifferent, he used it to raise up the work of more obscure filmmakers, independent filmmakers and documentaries, so that was a remarkable gift and use of his power. I don’t think there’s one critic that can wield that power again, but I do think as a group, film criticism and film critics, whether they’re on the Internet or they’re longer term critics that still remain in the newspapers and magazines, they do play an important role in the life, particularly of, smaller films because we don’t have the budgets on smaller films to promote it and put them in front of everybody. I did a film three years ago called The Interrupters that had virtually no money spent on it for its theatrical release, and yet, it got around the country to something like 80 or 90 markets and that really only could have happened as a result of the attention it got from critics and writers on the internet and people blogging about it to say that it was a film worth seeing. Before the Internet, with that little of money, it would have died and been a rock and went to the bottom of the pond.
E: Do you think that the same type of critical evaluation is given to documentaries compared to other cinematic works?
SJ: I think that a lot of times when critics write about documentaries they want to, more so than for fiction films, give them the benefit of the doubt because, usually, not always, the documentary is trying to address some significant issue of some kind, whether it’s in a didactic way or in a story, it’s about something that one could say is important. I think critics take that into account when they look at it, and I guess that’s to our benefit as documentary filmmakers that they do that. On the other hand, I think sometimes, too often, critics, when it comes to documentaries, they’re reviewing the content more than the filmmaking and they don’t either have an understanding or an appreciation for the craft of what goes into making a documentary good. They had a tendency to attribute a good documentary as just one in which they had a good subject or vivid access and that’s what makes a good documentary, but there’s a lot more to it than that. I see documentaries where the content wasn’t as jaw dropping but the filmmaking was much better, and I thought it was a better film all the time. And sometimes I think those distinctions are lost on critics. They’re more comfortable on the ground of fiction filmmaking in terms of analyzing the craft and form.
“Life Itself” is showing now at E Street Cinema.
