Reality TV with Nicholas Ray

With TCM spending this evening looking at the films of some of the people who died in 2024, I decided to watch a movie off my DVR that's nominally a documentary of a man who is dying: Lightning Over Water.

The man in question is director Nicholas Ray, who died in June 1979 after a couple years battling cancer. Some time before that, he had met German director Wim Wenders when they were working on a film together, and became friends. So, when Ray was diagnosed with cancer and wanted to keep working rather than go off someplace and die peacefully, Wenders was willing to work with Ray.

The movie opens up in early April, 1979, about two months before Ray's death. Wenders has been able to secure two weeks away from Los Angeles, where he was working on another project, and flies to New York where Ray is still living. All of this looks like it's done as recreations and on good film stock. Wenders gets to Ray's apartment fairly early in the morning when Ray is still asleep, but appearing to be in rather horrible pain from the cancer that's killing him. When Ray wakes up, at some point the film stock switches to video, which I presume is supposed to represent the idea that this is the "real", raw footage, as opposed to all those recreations that might not have represented any sort of reality in Ray's life.

Ray talks some about ideas he has for a film script, something that's obviously not going to be completed in his lifetime. But Wenders lets Ray talk about this, and then film scenes with Ray in a way that seem obviously scripted and not part of a documentary. Meanwhile, Ray also heads up to Vassar in Poughkeepsie to give a lecture after a screening of his earlier work The Lusty Men. Wenders films the limousine ride, as well as scenes from backstage and a bit of Ray's speech.

Eventually Wenders has to fly back to Los Angeles, but in mid-May, just a few weeks before Ray's death, is able to get back to New York to film more footage, including Ray working on "directing" rehearsals of a production of a Kafka stage play. But, it's not enough footage, as Ray dies, and there's an epilogue filmed after Ray's death.

There have been any number of documentaries of terminally ill or very elderly people who want portions of their lives documented before they die, so doing that for a prominent movie director like Nicholas Ray is not a bad thing. However, in watching Lightning Over Water, I couldn't help but get the feeling that almost none of this is real. It also feels a lot like a vanity project. In short, I think that Lightning Over Water is the sort of movie that fans of Nicholas Ray will like, but that average movie fans, and even more so people who aren't (yet) that big of a fan of older movies, aren't going to care so much for.