Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time is a documentary that was decades in the making: thirty-nine years, to be exact. Or as filmmaker Robert Weide (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth) would put it: “Two-thirds of my life.”
In addition to chronicling legendary novelist Kurt Vonnegut’s life and career, the film also tells the story of Weide’s friendship with his literary hero and the very long road to finishing the film. More than a simple framing device, Weide’s story is an essential part of the narrative and gives the film a unique character. Much like in Vonnegut’s work, the barrier between narrator and subject is crossed in meta fashion, but it also becomes one of the film’s strongest emotional through-lines as you watch Weide and Vonnegut’s relationship grow and deepen via letters and various video and audio clips. Thus Weide finally completing the film not only becomes a testament to perseverance, but it also becomes the ultimate tribute to a departed friend.
Speaking to Weide, he expanded on the origins of the film and why it took so long to finish…
“When I wrote to [Kurt] I actually said, ‘I think I can have the financing for the film and a finished film in like a year or two,’ Weide laughs. “That was in 1982. So the original idea was to just do a conventional sort of author documentary. The type of thing you might see on PBS. And I thought it wouldn’t be that difficult. The reason the film took so long to finish was actually just a very practical reason: I never really had the money to properly do it. I always had some assembly of clips and some scenes cut together, and back in I think 2001 we had a screening at the Museum of Broadcasting in New York, and Kurt actually attended that, but even that was just a few scenes that were cut together and then we did a Q&A. It just kept going on and I just kept filming him, even though I had no idea what the goal line was or what the finished film would be. I just thought so long as he’s willing to sit in front of the camera or walk around in front of the camera, I’ll just keep filming him, and as I say in the film, ‘I’ll figure this out later.’"
“And then he double-crossed me in 2007 by dying and I really didn’t know what to do," admits Weide. "Then came this idea of [me] being in the film and telling the story about — not just Vonnegut’s life story — but this meta element of me meeting my literary idol and us becoming such close friends during the making of the film as years started turning into decades, and the impact that had on the film and the struggle to make the film, and now I’m worried that ‘Do I need to disclose the fact that this guy’s a friend of mine?’ There were a lot of problems and a lot of questions, and then it was a couple of mutual friends of Kurt’s and myself who said, ‘Well, you’ve got to tell that story. That story should be folded into the documentary.’" So that's exactly what Weide ended up doing.
"That’s when I brought in Don Argott: a wonderful documentary filmmaker, who was also a Vonnegut fan. I said, ‘Look. I’ll continue to focus on Kurt’s biography. You can film me, interview me, and tell that story, and then we’ll create this hybrid between Kurt’s biography and this meta element.’ And at the end of the day, that’s what we did. But it wasn’t until we launched a Kickstarter campaign in 2015 that we got enough funds to really get serious and sit down and work on this full-time, and even that got stretched out because that’s, what,” Weide laughs again, “six and a half years ago!”
That intrigued me, that Weide didn't decide to include the meta element until after Vonnegut's death. "So this idea to bring yourself into the narrative — you didn’t come up with that until after Vonnegut’s passing?”
“Yeah,” answers Weide.
“That’s interesting. So you never got a chance to fly it by him,” I push further, “because I reckon he’d probably like it because it’s like what he did with his books.”
“Yeah, I think so too,” Weide replies, “that’s exactly right. When Vonnegut got stuck on a book and didn’t know how to move forward, he’d put himself into the book and interact with the characters. He does this in Breakfast of Champions; he does this a little bit in Slaughterhouse-Five. You know Timequake was really the most relevant metaphor for my film because Timequake was a book he was stuck on for ten years — could not figure out how to do it — kept giving up on it and the publisher said, ‘Well no, you can’t contractually give up on it.’ So Vonnegut got this idea of restructuring the book so that half the book is the story he intended to tell and the other half is him telling you — in real-time, so to speak — the struggle he’s having in finishing the book. So I think, yeah, he would approve in that I took the same way out that he took many times. But," admits Weide, "I was reluctant to be on camera. I’m not Michael Moore. I’m not Morgan Spurlock. This is really more self-deprecating than knocking anyone else’s work; I love those filmmakers. But I do say in the film, ‘I don’t even like documentaries where the filmmaker has to put himself in the film.’ I care about the subject. I don’t want to hear about the filmmaker. Who is this guy? I don’t care."
He continues, "That was always my big concern about this film, is that people would either say, ‘Who’s this guy?’ or that it would appear as some kind of ego trip. ‘Oh yes, Kurt Vonnegut and I were such good friends!’ I mean, who really cares? I’ve even read biographies like that where the author writes about himself and I don’t really care. So that was always the tricky part of this: Making that work, making it not seem like an ego trip — and again, that’s why I brought in Don Argott to film that part of it —and then getting that balance right. Because Don kept wanting to put more of me in the film and I kept wanting to take more of me out... Finally, one thought that occurred to me pretty late in the game was to have some of Vonnegut’s letters to me read out loud by Sam Waterston, who does a great job, and also I’m a documentarian and I’m sentimental and I’m nostalgic, so I recorded every voice message he left for me over twenty-five years on my old analog answering machine — on a physical cassette tape — I kept all that stuff. I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a way to keep that story alive without me having to put my mug on camera.’"
When it came to assembling all of that material, Weide says he kept his team pretty small, but purposeful.
“You look at the typical documentary now,” Weide says, “and you see all these producer and executive producer credits, and you see all these companies involved. The presentation credits for the companies are like ten minutes long. On here it’s Whyaduck Productions, which is my company, and 9.14 Pictures, which is Don Argott’s company, and that’s it. There’s one producer on the film and that’s me. There are four co-executive producers, who were Kickstarter contributors. So you’re looking at the archivist and the production manager. I’ve always been a one-man-band. When Don came in I finally had a cohort to work with me, and we had three editors primarily — who are credited on the film — who went through all the material. The letters, the audiotapes, the personal tapes that he sent me: Those are just things I held onto in boxes in my house and I eventually had to open up those boxes and go through them. So yeah, it was a bit of a logistical task just to physically go through the material and view it again and see what would work, but at least it was a pleasant subject that I loved.”
In addition to being a director, Weide is also a screenwriter and adapted Vonnegut’s Mother Night for Keith Gordon’s 1996 film adaption of the novel. Even though documentaries are more "unscripted", his experience as a screenwriter informed and shaped how to put Unstuck in Time together.
“It’s always about telling a story, isn’t it?” Weide says. “It’s not just enough to say, ‘Here’s Vonnegut’s life, and here’re his books.’ You have to be compelling in some way. It has to do with editing. It has to do with structuring. It has to do with knowing the story you want to tell and what your subplots are. So [screenwriting] is very related and at the end of the day, you just have to have something that makes it worth somebody’s while to sit for two hours and watch. That’s a lot of time to spend. You’ve got to give them something worthwhile and it’s like a screenplay: It’s a lot of trial and error..."
“So to me what the writing process is for a screenplay is really the editing process in film, be it a narrative feature or a documentary. And my approach to my documentaries is to film everything, to shoot everything, and just bring it all in the editing room and put it up on your computer, and start to whittle it down from there. Just the way you would if you wind up with a two hundred and forty-page screenplay. You’ve got to figure out what to keep and what to lose and what to rewrite. It’s all in the rewriting.”
Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time will be released via IFC Films on November 19th.