Ebert’s final message to James simply said: “i can’t.” Soon after that, on April 4, 2013, he died. “He was having fun.”Ībout three months after filming had begun, Ebert, 70, found it increasingly difficult to answer the questions James was asking via e-mail. “He was very aware of the whole process,” says one of the film’s producers, Zak Piper. At one point, he told James to take a shot of him in a mirror. He got pneumonia and he went back into the hospital, and from there it was a pretty precipitous decline.”ĭespite that, Ebert-always the student of cinema-threw himself into the project. He only came home for part of two days, and we were able to film that. Hopefully, he’ll get out, but we’ll have that part of his story,’ ” James says. “Like any good documentary filmmakers, we decided, ‘Well, we should film him in the hospital. “Roger said, ‘If we’re going to do it, we’re going to be all in’-meaning we were going to give them complete access,” Chaz recalls.īut just before James started filming in December 2012, Ebert was hospitalized with a fractured hip.

While years of fighting cancer of the thyroid and salivary glands had deprived Ebert of the ability to speak without a computer’s help, it hadn’t sidelined him from a busy life. James planned to film Ebert attending movie screenings and doing everyday things, like hosting a dinner party. It helped that Ebert admired James’s previous documentaries, especially 1994’s Hoop Dreams, which he called “one of the great moviegoing experiences of my lifetime.” James also directed 2011’s The Interrupters, about Chicago violence-intervention workers. I envision going back and forth between your life in the present and telling your life story.”

It’s a great template for what the film could be.

“Look, the memoir is beautifully written,” he told Ebert and Chaz. His widow, Chaz, recalls him saying: A film about a film critic? That didn’t sound like a very compelling cinematic experience to the late Ebert, who, over his 46-year career reviewing movies for the Sun-Times, was arguably the world’s most famous judge of a film’s strengths and weaknesses.īut in August 2012, when James, a director from Oak Park, explained why he wanted to create a screen version of Ebert’s 2011 book, Life Itself, he made a persuasive pitch. Would Roger Ebert give a thumbs-up to a movie about his own life? Steve James hoped so, but he was uncertain.

Roger ebert life itself book