Director
Simon Sauvé dropped out of film school to become assistant-editor. He worked several years on many features and docs. Got promoted to editor in 1996, cut dramas, auteur docs and TV Series. Met Jimmy Weber in fall of 1999 and started shooting Jimmywork in January 2000.
Jimmywork is his first feature.
Director’s Note
When Jimmy would say, “you like to waste tape, eh?” I would reply, “Don’t worry about it, the only person that’s going to suffer, is me.” “I know,” he would conclude quite seriously, his chuckle turning into intoxicated laughter. The production of Jimmywork spanned three years, from January 2000 to September 2003, accumulating along the way nearly 200 hours of anecdotes, slices of life, infamy, perversity, slap-stick comedy and moments of unnerving banality. Starting with the principle that if the observation of a person, place or situation is maintained long enough, then the stories and twists will follow, I committed myself to this project. I plunged headlong, becoming an archivist of time. At the end of a production that was supposed to be an intimate documentary of a down and out fifty year old man, I realized I had the possibility of making a grandiose portrayal of a character that had become larger than life.
The savage nature and do it yourself approach of this project had saved me from explaining my intentions and objectives to anyone, but since I needed funding to complete the film, it became necessary to devise a first draft of the story as soon as possible. The edit option seemed the most logical since the material had already been shot. But I still didn’t have the means of renting an editing suite and paying assistants for the number of months that it would have taken to accomplish the ambitious task of “demystifying” 200 hours of rushes. I chose the option of writing a script. Equipped with an old Mac Classic and a Walkman, I dissected the material by listening to kilometres of sync sound (DAT) and retranscribing each retort of each scene onto paper. I chose to work strictly with the sound track instead of the images because the images drew attention to problems in the framing, lighting, continuity and provoked a reflection on the obstacles that would present themselves during editing; at this stage, the priority was organizing a coherent narrative.
One pitfall of drawn out projects is the risk of losing objectivity with respect to the characters. I became conscious of this during the months I spent side by side filming the untiring Jimmy. Once the original fascination faded, it became essential that I detach myself from the project. First of all, I began transcribing the sound track into my mother tongue, French; since Jimmy was Anglophone, he was recorded in English. Given that the material was already very rich in its original form, this experiment permitted me to distil the dialogue and mold Jimmy into a more precise rendition of a Bukowskian anti-hero. In the script, he became the product of my interpretation. Whether in On the Road (Kerouac) or South of No North (Bukowski), the authors start with a real bibliographic/historical fact and transform it, reinvent it - putting poetry into the real and truth into fiction. This is what I wanted to do in Jimmywork, pushing the marriage between fictional delirium and raw reality as far as possible. I wanted to reach the point where the spectator no longer asked whether this was real or not, but simply accepted the story as it was being told.
The outcome of this effort of transcribing, translating, and distilling the narrative to a 160 page script was that it made me realize there was a story buried somewhere in the huge batch of tapes that had been occupying my office over the years. Curiously, but not surprisingly, this effort was insufficient to convince the financial institutions on the first try. They didn’t believe that a feature film could rest on Jimmy’s shoulders alone, a character that had emerged from reality. It was at a screening of the first cut (a version more than two hours long), one year after the initial application, that they grasped the true essence of Jimmywork.
This great adventure obviously concluded with a happy ending; the financing was eventually acquired, the film completed and blown up to 35mm, and it was selected to many important festivals in the world… In all sincerity, the aspect I’m most proud of is having held on strong right up until the very end. Of course, I operated the typewriter and made some editorial choices in collaboration with Santiago Hidalgo, my script doctor extraordinaire. But in the end, this was nothing more than putting words on images that already spoke for themselves. Jimmy exceeded my imagination, I could have never invented him. He was a wild animal that let himself be observed. He is a genuine human being.
In spite of my genuine fascination with filming the unpredictable, this method of filmmaking, the gathering of fragments of reality, was imposed by the subject itself. I believe that the greatest actors reside in reality, that the most authentic dramas unfold in real life. I think I still haven’t finished exploring this vast terrain.
Simon Sauvé, January 2005
(translated by Santiago Hidalgo)