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If anyone deserves getting a Kickstarter for a film fully funded in a day's time, it's Joan Didion. (Ahem, step aside Zach Braff.) A documentary on the iconic 79-year-old writer's fascinating and tumultuous life is in the works—and it looks like it's on its way to getting completed.
The Kickstarter campaign for "We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order to Live" has already raised $111,000 over its $80,000 goal since it launched on Wednesday. And since the documentary is co-directed by Didion's nephew, Griffin Dunne (a producer, writer and actor triple threat), we'll be getting an up close and personal look into Didion's life that not that many people get a chance to.
In the trailer, Dunne promises to stitch together stock footage and photos illustrating Didion's life, with interviews from her and people close to her. He touches upon her work in literary journalism, covering the Manson murders and the Central Park Five, and her other literary achievements. He says he already has 60 hours of footage, mostly of Didion, and needs the Kickstarter money to film the interviews with people involved in her life, like Annie Leibovitz, Cameron Crowe and Bret Easton Ellis.
Also in the video, we see Didion talking about her heartbreaking tragedies, where her husband and daughter both died soon after one another. She reads aloud a passage from her book, The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir about her husband's death: "Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.The question of self-pity."
Here is the trailer for the film:
