THE DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON
Jeff Feuerzeig’s The Devil and Daniel Johnston has been hailed by both Indiewire and Rolling Stone as one of the best music documentaries of the 21st century. The film’s epic exploration of singer-songwriter and outsider artist Daniel Johnston’s nakedly confessional body of work is, in the words of film critic Matt Zoller Seitz, “A true nonfiction film, a movie that tries to do with sound and image what Nick Tosches and Norman Mailer tried to do with prose, bending it into poetry to find a more subjective route to the truth.” Seamlessly integrating audio recordings, journal entries and home movies with heightened POV recreations to shape an immersive cinematic experience, Feuerzeig helped to launch a new wave of radical documentary storytelling. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where Feuerzeig was awarded the Grand Jury Prize for Best Director. It was distributed theatrically by Sony Pictures Classics.
Credits:
Jeff Feuerzeig
|Director
Jeff Feuerzeig’s stunning outsider portraits and cinematic investigations into the fine line between transgression and transcendence include the feature documentaries Half Japanese: The Band That Would Be King, The Devil and Daniel Johnston and Author: The JT Leroy Story. For The Devil and Daniel Johnson, Feuerzeig was awarded the Grand Jury Prize for Best Director at the Sundance Film Festival. Feuerzeig has additionally written, produced and/or directed numerous works for television, including Mike Judge’s cult classic Tales From The Tour Bus and the ESPN 30-for-30 The Real Rocky. His commercial work includes eye-popping and joyous campaigns for Google, HBO and Nokia, as well as a year-long partnership with the godfather of direct cinema, Albert Maysles, creating award-winning short-form documentaries for IBM.