Why now 
 
 Incredibly, this story has never been told. Now that we have the access, we must tell it. This is our chance to be Joan's witness. 
 
 Our journey began a couple of years ago, when we shot Joan as part of a short video to accompany her book tour for Blue Nights. 
 
 After hours of watching her read and reflect it became clear that we could not stop there–we had to do something much larger and deeper. Storytelling was a way of enduring the potent rawness Joan experienced through life, and through loss. Now we must be the ones to preserve this. To preserve her legacy. 
 
 "I have felt compelled to write things since I was five years old... I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear." –Joan Didion 
 
 Why here 
 
 We have come to Kickstarter to reach as many people as possible. We believe in the Kickstarter community. 
 
 No gift is too small. When you donate, you are proving that there is a huge, hungry audience for a documentary about Joan. 
 
 And by supporting this campaign, you are actually making this film with us. 
 
 The players 
 
 Alongside Joan's presence throughout the film, notable artists, writers, and actors will be interviewed. 
 
 Some include: 
 
 Patti Smith. Vanessa Redgrave. Michelle Williams. Cameron Crowe. Annie Leibovitz. Michiko Kakutani. Anna Wintour. Bret Easton Ellis. Scott Rudin. Jann Wenner. Graydon Carter. Allison Janney. Robert Silvers. Liam Neeson. 
 
 And many more. 
 
 "[Joan Didion] cut loose any fixed idea that I ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself." 
 
 –Michiko Kakutani, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for The New York Times 
 
 Our goal 
 
 So far we have shot 60 hours of footage, primarily of Joan. Now we need to shoot key interviews as described in "The players" section above. 
 
 Joan was a chronicler of her times, and that world is quickly disappearing. 
 
 Who we are 
 
 Director Griffin Dunne is an accomplished actor, producer, and director. Griffin made his foray into directing with the short film Duke of Groove, for which he received an Academy Award nomination. His feature film directorial debut was Addicted to Love; followed by Practical Magic, Fierce People, and The Accidental Husband. He is also a frequent director for The Good Wife. As an actor he is best known for After Hours, directed by Martin Scorsese, which Griffin also produced, An American Werewolf in London, directed by John Landis, and Johnny Dangerously with Michael Keaton. 
 
 Director Susanne Rostock is a veteran documentary editor and director whose most recent film, Sing Your Song, opened in the U.S. Documentary Competition section at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. Susanne’s 20-year multi–award winning collaboration as editor with director Michael Apted has produced such richly provocative films as: The Long Way Home, Me & Isaac Newton, and Moving The Mountain. She has achieved recognition for her editing on a myriad of films, garnering Emmys, IDA awards, Cable Ace awards, a Gold Hugo and acknowledgement from multiple national and international festivals. 
 
 Producer Annabelle Dunne produces films with Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter. Their newest project, a documentary about Nora Ephron, will be released by HBO in 2015. The niece of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, Annabelle has grown up in a family of writers. 
 
 Producer Mary Recine has earned an Emmy Award and three Peabody Awards for her documentary work. Her current film projects include documentaries directed by Rebecca Cammisa and Liz Garbus. Collaborating with filmmaker Ric Burns for many years, Mary produced the critically acclaimed Eugene O’Neill: A Documentary Film; Andy Warhol: A Documentary; and Into the Deep among others. Her earlier credits as producer include the PBS series EGG, the Arts Show and City Life. 
 
 Campaign consultant Vann Alexandra is a creative services agency that gets projects financed through crowdfunding with a 100% success rate. The company’s founder Alex Daly has been dubbed the Crowdsourceress. They have worked on campaigns with Neil Young, Oscar and Emmy-nominated filmmakers, top designers, and citizen investigative journalist Brown Moses. 
 
 Campaign video RAVA Films 
 
 PHOTO CREDITS: 
 
 © Julian Wasser 
 
 © Mary Ellen Mark ||||| 
 
 
 
 In the preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion’s collection of essays from the 1960s, the author speaks to her primary strength as a journalist. “My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.” Perhaps some of her subjects would agree, but the vast majority of American readers and writers — including the people who give out the National Book Award and the National Medal of Arts and Humanities — would beg to differ. Joan Didion’s work has been squarely within our best interests for half a century. Now, her story will be shared in a documentary. 
 
 And it turns out that Kickstarter, the same platform that gave us such lowbrow projects as the infamous potato salad, can provide much more value than mayonnaise and Yukon Golds. The project reached its funding goal of $80,000 before the end of its first day and has already exceeded that amount by nearly $20,000. Its 1,500-and-counting backers will receive rewards like Didion’s recipe book, and, for the high-rollers, a pair from her famed collection of sunglasses. 
 
 Driven by Didion’s nephew, filmmaker Griffin Dunne, We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order to Live will weave together archival photographs, Didion’s words, and interviews with those who know her and whose work she’s inspired. It will cover both her writing career, which began as a staff writer at Vogue in the 1950s, and her personal life, which saw the devastating losses, in quick succession, of her husband and daughter. 
 
 Participating in the project, Didion has already allowed the team to capture nearly 60 hours of footage. She’ll also select the passages from her essays and novels to read aloud for the film. Between Didion’s involvement and the reverence Dunne has for his aunt, the film may be more a celebration than a balanced account. 
 
 But a celebration is most definitely due. And there’s at least one good reason to believe We Tell Ourselves Stories will neither sugarcoat nor edit out the unsavory bits: Didion’s already written it all down anyway. “Everything that has happened to Joan,” explains Dunne in the Kickstarter video, “Joan has written about.” Hopefully those experiences will resonate as strongly on the screen as they do on the page. ||||| In Blue Nights, Joan Didion wrote: “Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.” A forthcoming documentary about the life and words of Didion is hoping to capture some of those elusive memories on film and preserve them for the ages. 
 
 The film, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, which takes its title from a Didion quote, is being made by the author’s nephew, Griffin Dunne, an actor and film-maker who has teamed up with documentarian Susanne Rostock to tell his aunt’s tale. The film’s fundraising page notes, “Storytelling was a way of enduring the potent rawness Joan experienced through life, and through loss. Now we must be the ones to preserve this. To preserve her legacy.” 
 
 But for Dunne, it’s more personal. “This is a story that I’m telling in order to live,” he says in the trailer for the documentary. “When she’s not here, I will be.” 
 
 It’s quite the story, too. Didion published her first novel in 1963, at the age of 29, while she was still working her way up the masthead at Vogue. Upon moving to California with her husband John Gregory Dunne, Didion published what many consider her pre-eminent work, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a pitch perfect and searing collection of magazine essays. Since then she has written five novels, a play, a handful of screenplays and eight books of essays, including The Year of Magical Thinking, which won the National Book Award for nonfiction and cemented her reputation as one of the most esteemed writers of our time. In 2013, President Obama awarded her the National Medals of Arts and Humanities. In the trailer for the film, Dunne calls Didion “perhaps the most influential American writer alive”, and it’s hard to disagree. 
 
 At almost 80 years old, Didion has barely slowed down. The trailer for the film shows her diligently still writing at her desk. “Some writers – and Joan is one – they need to write,” explains Dunne in the trailer. “Joan writes to survive.” 
 
 Despite her long and storied career, no one has yet made a film about her. “We’re making [this film] because – incredibly – no one else has made a documentary about Joan Didion. It’s a mystery,” Dunne says in the trailer. (A mystery perhaps solved by the recognition that because Didion has devoted her career to a careful introspection and self-analysis, no one but family would dare to take up the task.) 
 
 Dunne started filming his aunt a few years ago, when he made a short film to accompany her latest memoir, Blue Nights, a starkly conscientious consideration of ageing and parenting. According to the documentary’s Kickstarter page, “After hours of watching her read and reflect, it became clear that we could not stop there – we had to do something much larger and deeper.” 
 
 Based on the trailer for the film, which is still in production, the documentary appears to neatly weave together Didion’s past and present, taking photographs from her personal life, clips of the critical news events she covered, including the Manson family, and interviews with people who have worked with her. Author and musician Patti Smith, actors Vanessa Redgrave and Allison Janney, Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Graydon Carter, and author Bret Easton Ellis are already on board for the project, which Dunne calls “a collage that captures the emotions of the time”. 
 
 Dunne also captured footage of Didion reading her own words and offering her own take on her legacy and influence on journalism and literature alike. “The film will be very visual by using her prose,” Dunne told Vogue.com. “The narration is already written, because Joan has been writing it since she was a little girl.” 
 
 The book trailer for Blue Nights gives a sense of what the full documentary might feel like, filled with close-ups of Didion’s face, detailed shots of her hands writing and an overall intimate and deeply personal feel. 
 
 According to the film’s Kickstarter page, the movie “will tell Joan’s story through passages she has chosen (and will read aloud) from her work, as her friends, family, colleagues and critics share their accounts of her remarkable life and writing”. One particularly poignant scene features Didion at her desk, reading from her computer screen: “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant.” It’s the opening words to Didion’s autobiographical novel The Year of Magical Thinking, which chronicled the unthinkable year where she lost both her husband and daughter. It’s a moving moment from the film’s six-minute trailer and it bodes well for the power of a full-length documentary. 
 
 Telling his aunt’s story, Dunne said, “is a heady responsibility that I want to get right.” 
 
 “People don’t know what Joan sounds like,” says Dunne in the trailer. “They don’t know that a woman so tiny in frame is a lion.” 
 
 The campaign for We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live is at Kickstarter ||||| Joan Didion is famously press-shy. Now 79 and frail, she rarely grants in-depth interviews, even skipping glamorous events held in her honor. 
 
 Which is why her nephew, the actor Griffin Dunne, was taken aback when the author readily agreed to let him make a documentary about her. 
 
 “I laid it out for her, and then there was this four-second pause -- an unreadable pause,” he recounted. “And she just said, ‘All right.’ And I said, ‘All right to this?’ And she said, ‘Yeah.’ Like, don’t make me say ‘yes’ again.” 
 
 On Wednesday, Dunne released a trailer for the yet-to-be-completed film, titled “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live” as part of Kickstarter campaign. Just hours after the financing drive went live, donations had already surpassed half of the $80,000 goal. 
 
 “I've always known she had a legion of fans that grows with every generation,” said Dunne, who is co-directing the project with Susanne Rostock, the filmmaker behind 2011’s Harry Belafonte documentary, “Sing Your Song.” “But I’m still taken aback by the response. Every time I get up to use the bathroom the number has gone up.” 
 
 "We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live" Trailer Trailer for new Joan Didion documentary "We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live." Trailer for new Joan Didion documentary "We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live." See more videos 
 
 Dunne is the son of late Vanity Fair writer Dominick Dunne, whose brother, author John Dunne, was married to Didion until his death in 2009. Growing up in California, Griffin Dunne was close to his aunt and uncle and often attended parties at their home as a teenager. 
 
 “They were always a good name drop when I was wooing a girl as a teenager,” he said with a chuckle. “They always included me in their social lives, and I was of course very aware of how important they were as writers.” 
 
 Since, he and Didion have remained close -- particularly since the death of the elder Dunne brothers. 
 
 Her prose is so visual and conducive to film -- kind of like an audiobook for the eyes. — Griffin Dunne 
 
 "It's sort of like we're the only two left, in a way -- certainly in New York," he said. "So we see each other a lot. She's a very family-oriented person." 
 
 So when Didion needed a promotional video made for 2011's "Blue Nights" -- a personal memoir about the death of her daughter, Quintana Roo, after the loss of her husband -- she asked Dunne if he'd shoot it. Though he has primarily worked as an actor -- best known for starring in the '80s flicks “After Hours” and “An American Werewolf in London” -- he was game. The project turned out so well that he decided to explore a feature-length documentary. 
 
 “Her prose is so visual and conducive to film -- kind of like an audiobook for the eyes,” he said. “It just seemed like the next natural step. Plus, a documentary about her had never been made before. There was a certain obligation.” 
 
 Dunne says the film will be peppered with archival footage and will include a lot of Didion reading from her work, as well as interviews with the historical figures she wrote about. But those hoping to witness how the famous author spends her days -- she's currently penning a play for Scott Rudin -- will be sorely disappointed. 
 
 Dunne is interviewing Didion for the film, however, and said his aunt has been “incredibly touched” by the response to the Kickstarter campaign. Initially, he feared she might back out when he asked her, for instance, to give away two pairs of her sunglasses that will be go to two individuals who donate $2,500 apiece. 
 
 “We felt very sheepish asking her, but she just went, ‘OK,’” he recalled. “She’s got a dish by the hall table where there are about six pairs of sunglasses lined up, and they go in revolving positions on her face depending on the light outside. It’s quite a big thing for her to part with them.” 
 
 Didion has always loomed large in Dunne’s mind. At numerous points in the interview, he described her as daunting, even though he said she has never given him any reason to fear her. 
 
 “To this day, I’ll still hear a question I ask her echo back in my head, like, ‘Oh, that’s a stupid question,’” he said. “But the things she’s written about in such depth -- most mortals will never attain that kind of intellectual grace.” 
 
 
 
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– The early results of a new Kickstarter campaign make it safe to say that the world very much wants to see a documentary on author Joan Didion. In its first day, the funding campaign exceeded its goal of $80,000, reports Time. By this morning, it had reached $123,000 and counting, with 28 days still left. All of which means that Didion's nephew, filmmaker Griffin Dunne, will move ahead with We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live. The project has the blessing of his "incredibly private" 79-year-old aunt. "I've always known she had a legion of fans that grows with every generation," Dunne tells the Los Angeles Times. "But I'm still taken aback by the response. Every time I get up to use the bathroom, the number has gone up." Didion published her first novel in 1963, notes the Guardian, and soon after gained widespread acclaim for Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a collection of magazine essays. She's been writing fiction and non-fiction alike since, including The Year of Magical Thinking, which won the 2005 National Book Award for non-fiction. The memoir chronicles her grief after the death of her husband, John Dunne. Fans who pledge can get some interesting stuff in return, from Didion's list of the 12 books you must read before you die ($35) to the chance to have your two-page letter read aloud to her ($350) to a pair of her sunglasses ($2,500).