As you may have realized giving his output in the last decade and all the projects he’s announced/ become attached to recently, director Jonathan Demme has become quite documentary happy.
While the preoccupation with doc work can be seen early on in Demme’s career as well, his current slate includes the Katrina documentary, “Right to Return: New Home Movies from the Lower 9th Ward,” a third Neil Young documentary in the works (or will be very soon), and he may or may not be moving forward on a Bob Marley documentary that he has already completed.
While Haiti and the disaster relief effort have obviously been in the media for months now, Demme has been interested in the country for awhile. In 1987 he made “Haiti: Dreams of Democracy” and “The Agronomist” (about the man who ran Haiti’s first independent radio station) in 2003. And before the earthquake struck, Demme was apparently going to meet up with Arcade Fire in the country (founding member Régine Chassagne is Haitian) to shoot a “music driven” documentary, according to an interview with the Boston Phoenix yesterday.
“I was heading for Haiti last Friday with the band Arcade Fire. We were going to do a music driven, kind of music documentary, against a backdrop of carnival in Jacmel — the great, now devastated, south coast Haitian city. We had our final conference call the morning of the day the quake struck. We were gonna go down anyway until we realized we can’t really get there. My personal feeling was, those who go down two months or three months from now, with a specific mission in mind, will be valuable in their own way, as the people that are going now. So I’m gonna go. I’m gonna go within the next six months, but I haven’t been yet.”
This makes sense considering the Arcade Fire’s ties to the devastated nation, and the reason they licensed their song, “Wake Up” for the 2010 Superbowl and gave 100% of the profits to relief funds (many cried foul during the broadcast at the ubiquity of the ad, not realizing that the more it was run, the more money would go towards the cause; music licensing for the Superbowl must run a very pretty penny…). Will they pick this documentary up again six months from now? It’s hard to say, the Arcade Fire are expected to release an album this spring with presumably heavy touring to follow, so those schedules don’t sound like they will sync up, but here’s to hoping this will happen one day.
Demme is apparently also going to make an animated adaptation of Dave Eggers’ 2009 novel, “Zeitoun,” about one man’s experience in the wake of Hurricane Katrina trying to protect his home and business, while helping others from his canoe. The prolific and productive director is also set to co-write and direct the pilot episode of the upcoming HBO series “The Long Fall,” based on the detective series by Walter Mosely. Clearly the 66 year old is not ready to slow down.
