Bay Area icon Joan Didion, best know for her powerful novels and literary journalism about life, death, and culture in 1960s California, is finally getting her time on the silver screen.
Didion's nephew, actor Griffin Dunne (Dallas Buyers Club) will co-direct a documentary aptly named We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live about his aunt's life and storied career with veteran filmmaker Susanne Rostock. The pair put the project up on Kickstarter on October 23, where it promptly reached its goal of $80,000 in 24 hours (the campaign has since raised more than $177,000).
According to the crowd funding page, the doc will alternate old photos of Didion with snippets of her reading selected passages, interspersed with newsreel-style coverage of the political upheavals she covered and interviews with such notables as Patti Smith, Liam Neeson, Jann Wenner, Anna Wintour, and Graydon Carter. Sixty hours of footage have already been shot, and the film should be done by next September.
Watch the campaign trailer below:
