The life of the Bob Marley documentary has lead a circuitous, bumpy one so far.
The Weinstein Company project was first announced in February 2008 with Martin Scorsese at the helm and it was supposed to hit in time for what will be Marley’s 65th birthday, Feb. 6, 2010 (A regular Marly biopic was announced by TWC one month later and was slotted for a late 2009 release at the time, but obviously that didn’t happen and rights issues may have bumped it off for several years).
In May 2008, Scorsese, perhaps overloaded with work, left the Marley doc project and director Jonathan Demme took over. Then late this summer, the New York Post reported that Demme parted ways with the project as well, but we spoke to Demme during TIFF doing promotion of his latest rock doc, “Neil Young Trunk Show,” (another solid effort you should see).
“What happened hasn’t fully happened yet,” Demme said alluding to the documentaries internal problems. “The Marley documentary is on absolute hold. The portrait that I fashioned from all the archival footage of Bob Marley is one that I love very much, but [that love] is not shared by the financiers and the project is on complete hold at the moment and there’s a lot of discussion going on geared to try and find the most positive possible resolution to this situation.”
Demme’s comments basically confirm the NYPost’s earlier report that claimed producer Steve Bing was less-than-impressed after seeing the director’s first round of editing. So what does he mean about resolution, is he talking about a legal conclusion or one of financial restitution? Or perhaps a come to Jesus meeting where the creative issues on both sides can come to terms with one another.
It essentially seems that Demme’s cut of “Marley” (the working title) is mostly done, so if Bing and the filmmaker could come to terms we still could have a documentary in tandem with the Feb, 2010 birthday date, but that does remain to be seen and it appears both parties are at an impasse. Lets hope it happens.
Meanwhile, Demme, who is known for narrative pictures like “Silence Of The Lambs,” and “Rachel Getting Married,” has really quietly spent much of his career on the documentary side of things — “Jimmy Carter Man from Plains,” “The Agronomist,” “Storefront Hitchcock,” “Swimming to Cambodia,” ” “Stop Making Sense,” just to name a few — and this appears to be the direction he’s going to continue with having no feature-length films on his plate currently, but a rash of documentary ideas in the air and on the go.
Having already made two Neil Young documentaries (“Neil Young: Heart of Gold” is the first), Demme has said he’d like to complete that narrative with a third documentary. He also has other ideas a-swirling.
“I would love to do a portrait documentary of Reverend Jeremiah Wright,” Demme said of Barack Obama’s former pastor who was at the center of a 2008 political controversy for his racist and anti-American invectives that threatened to derail Obama’s campaign before he was elected President.
“I don’t know how he would wind up coming across, but I do know in this extraordinarily media reductive moment in time where a person can suddenly be on every one’s mind and then can be summarized in a 40 second series of clips and that’s our take away, I hunger to know [more]. He was a tremendously important figure in America for a minute, and in his world and therefore in the country has been for a long time. This isn’t the me that necessarily wants to make a film about someone who inspires me. This time it’s about someone I have tremendous curiosity about.”
Working On An Inspirational New Orleans Documentary
Demme said he’s also been spending time in New Orleans for the last four years, flying down their three or four times a year and creating documentaries on several inspiring post-Katrina figures who have struggled to keep their communities thriving including Pastor Melvin Jones.
“I went down four months after the floods and connected with a dozen people who were the pioneers that were moving back into their devastated neighborhoods and rising to the challenge and in the face of complete indifference and even obstructionism. They were going to get their homes back and rebuild no matter what.”
The documentary was initially supposed to be a one year project, but Demme says he became so inspired by the collective efforts that he has continued to keep shooting regardless of having no distributor or financial support system other than his own. “I’m not doing this for anyone, it’s my own piece,” he said. “The people are so inspiring, so I’m still doing these inspirational portraits, but I’m not sure what form they’re going to take.”
Something thoughtful and well-observed, no doubt. — with additional reporting by Sam C. Mac