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“An Inconvenient Truth”, “Citizenfour” and “Food Inc.” In this way, Diane Weyermann, who oversaw the production of powerful documentaries, helped the documentary world move from a serious and underfunded recession of the film industry to a living necessity. – see category, he died on October 14th in a Manhattan nursing home. He was 66 years old.
His sister, Andrea Weyermann, said the cause was lung cancer.
“Diane was one of the most remarkable people I have ever met,” said former vice-president and presidential candidate Al Gore, who, in a seemingly quixotic mission to educate the world on climate change, had the unexpected success of a decades-old traveling slideshow. The movie with the weird title “An Inconvenient Truth”. “He was extremely talented in his craft and full of empathy,” he added in a phone interview. “It would be no exaggeration to say that he really changed the world.”
So is the movie. “An Inconvenient Truth” He won an Oscar in 2007 and Mr Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize In the same year, it was shared with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It became one of the highest-grossing documentaries ever made, the second to be produced by the activist film company Participant, of which Ms. Weyermann was a longtime director and that not many in Hollywood thought was a good idea. It was a movie about a slide show, after all.
When the filmmakers screened the film for a major studio in hopes of distribution, some executives fell asleep. Director Davis Guggenheim recalls, “There was loud snoring, and when it was over, one of them said, ‘Nobody’s going to pay a babysitter to go to the theater and see this movie, but we.’ It will help you make 10,000 CDs that you can give to science teachers for free.’”
The pessimistic Mr. Guggenheim, Mr. Gore, Mrs. Weyermann, and others went to a steakhouse in Burbank, California, brooding, but Mrs. Weyermann refused to be discouraged.
“Wait until Sundance,” he said.
“An Inconvenient Truth” received four standing ovations at the Sundance Film Festival, and Paramount acquired the distribution rights.
Participant It was started in 2004 by social entrepreneur and first president of eBay, Jeff Skoll, with his own mission: to make films about pressing social issues. Ms. Weyermann, a former public interest lawyer, was running the documentary program at the Sundance Institute when Mr. Skoll hired her in 2005, but was worried that Robert Redford, a friend and founder of the institute, would be offended. (He was not and blessed the movement).
“From the beginning, Diane brought knowledge, relationships, context and industry insights to our team,” Mr. Skoll said in an email. “The participant was a small, thriving company at the time, with limited direct film industry expertise, and we had very little documentary experience.”
The participant will go on to produce more than 100 films, including the films “Spotlight”, “Contagion” and “Roma” and the documentaries “My Name Is Pauli Murray” and “The Great Invisible”.
“Diane has put together an incredible list of movies that make a difference on everything from nuclear weapons to education, the environment, and much more,” Skoll said. “He was the heart and soul of the Participant.”
It was Ms. Weyermann’s job to find, finance, create and promote documentaries from all over the world, and she traveled constantly to do so.
In 2013, director Laura Poitras “Citizen Four” – the Oscar-winning story of Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor who exposed the government’s rampant surveillance programs – trapped in Berlin when Ms. Weyermann came to see him.
“Diane knew I wouldn’t be able to travel to the US,” said Ms. Poitras, as she was worried she might be detained or arrested; Mr Snowden had been a fugitive and a lawsuit célèbre during his reporting. “He wanted to make sure I was okay and I wanted him to see the cuts. I had hundreds of hours of film, and I immediately said to him, ‘I can’t provide any documentation,'” – movie studios often require detailed written offers – and he immediately said, ‘We’ll do it and I’m behind you. ‘”
“He loved being in the editing room,” added Ms. Poitras. “He had an incredible ability to watch a movie when it was really raw and to be in tune with the movie and what the producer needed. You asked for his notes; He always made the job better.”
Mr Guggenheim describes him as “a director’s whisperer”.
It wasn’t just the big box office movies he supported, said Ally Derks, the film’s founder. International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. “It was also the small, fragile films that he nurtured. was in India. Rahul JainHis film about pollution in New Delhi, which had just been screened at Cannes. He was in Siberia with the Russian filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky, the 2018 film. “Aquarelle” It has almost no dialogue or people and takes a gripping look at the water, from a waterfall in Venezuela to the breaking up glaciers in Greenland.
The in a review New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis called “Aquarela” a “stunning, sometimes numbing, sensual symphony” and noted the film’s ending: a rainbow over the world’s tallest waterfall. “It feels like a little bit of hope,” he wrote.
Diane Hope Weyermann was born on September 22, 1955 in St. He was born in Louis. His father, Andrew, was a Lutheran pastor; his mother, Wilma (Tietjen) Weyermann, was a housewife and later worked for a glassware company.
Diane studied public relations at George Washington University in Washington, graduating in 1977, and earned a law degree from Saint Louis University Law School four years later. He worked as a legal aid attorney before attending film school at Columbia College Chicago, graduating with an MFA in film and video in 1992.
In the same year, his short documentary “Women of Moscow – Echoes of Yaroslavna” about seven Russian women, shot by a Russian and Estonian team, was screened at the Miss Derks festival in Amsterdam. Miss Weyermann also made a short film about her father’s hands.
In 1996, he began helping others through making films when he became the director of the Open Society Institute Arts and Culture Program, one of the benefactors of billionaire investor George Soros and now known as the Open Society Foundation. He founded the Soros Documentary Fund, which supports international documentaries focusing on social justice issues.
When Ms. Weyermann was hired by the Sundance Institute to set up the documentary film program in 2002, she brought along the Soros Fund. There he set up annual labs for documentary filmmakers where they could work with others on their own films, creating the kind of community documentarians crave.
In addition to her sister Andrea, Ms. Weyermann is survived by a brother, James. Another sister, investigative journalist Debra Weyermann, died in 2013.
In 2018, Mr. Weyermann became co-chairman of the Academy Awards foreign film category, along with screenwriter and producer Larry Karaszewski. They immediately changed the name of the category to: “international feature film” He pointed out that the word “foreigner” is not fully inclusive. “Diane has found a way to cut the daily bullshit,” said Mr. Karaszewski.
Inside 2008 interview, Ms. Weyermann was asked if she wanted too much for a movie to make a difference in society.
“When movies are made for just that purpose, lead falls like a balloon,” he replied. “What I love about cinema is that it is a creative medium. Not just ‘Let’s focus and educate’, but ‘Let’s tell a story, tell it well, tell it poetically. Let’s put that in a not so obvious way.’”
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