Spotlight: James Jewell and “Some Other Paris”
Writer, director, and musician James Jewel discusses his recent film, “Some Other Paris,” in this interview with Blake Denham. If you missed this interview at the PLU8 launch, catch it here!
James Jewell's “Some Other Paris” is a documentary taking place in the city of lights where he and his wife Kara lived for eight years. The documentary “paints a picture of [Jewell's] experience in the city”, filling the canvas with people he met while there, set against the backdrop of the city itself. When James realized that he would be leaving the city, he felt a strong urge to give back to the city which he had come to develop a connection to. His wife Kara had always wanted to do a documentary about life in Paris, and so together they decided to make one. In the short time before their departure, he began filming everything, attempting to capture any moment that might effectively express his feelings towards his French home. “I just filmed everything - anyone who would agree to get filmed.” The result of this footage and post production is “Some Other Paris.” The piece, as Jewell puts it, is “an homage to our time in Paris... It was a tribute.”
James Jewell’s love letter to Paris: watch it here.
“Some Other Paris” was prepared in an unconventional way. James says that “A lot of others who make documentaries might not appreciate what I did... A lot of times you take a subject, like Paris, and you research it, dive into it, and get as much information as you can and as much diversity as you can, and you try to paint a picture. I had already done all that research in my 8 years of living there, so I just used my experience.” During our conversation, James described to me a bit about his experience in the city. He said that, before he had even arrived in France, “Something told me [James] that I was super fortunate to be in Paris, even though I would have rather been elsewhere... But I immediately fell in love with the eccentricity of Paris, and it was just such an odd place to have landed - I just felt like I was on such a grand adventure...” He told me that the first few months in the city were “really tough...” because he did not feel that he had a community to engage and grow with. Eventually, however, thanks to a friend, he was introduced to a group of expats living in Paris. “That expat scene - that scene really saved me. I don't know if we would have lasted as long [in Paris] as we did.” The impact that this group had on James is translated into the large presence it has in the film - many of the people and places featured in the film are connected in one way or another to the community. Jewell also made sure to include people from outside this community, saying that he wanted to, “[pull] the film out of the expat scene” and broaden the diversity of the film to also include the city at large and give a nod to the influence of the city itself. James – who now lives in Chicago - looks back on his time in Paris with great love and appreciation.
“[the film was] an homage to our time in Paris... It was a tribute.”
Another unique aspect of “Some Other Paris” is its length. Inspired by producers like Micheal Moore, James decided to make the run-time of the documentary 1 hour and 40 minutes, versus the standard 55 minutes. “I had always wanted to make a feature film... The idea was to feature the people, the place, and the lifestyle.” In my opinion, James uses of the longer length effectively, allowing for the production to feature many different people and scenes from around Paris. The interviews are for the most part conducted in the homes of those being interviewed, while others are filmed at a cafe, a bar, or a holiday dinner. “so that you got some idea of where they were.” The cinematography further adds a feeling of engagement. The film is shot mostly from a first-person perspective, putting the viewer in the room and inviting them into the conversation that takes place on the screen. B-role footage of Paris that plays between interviews frequently anchors the viewer back into the documentary's setting, and showcases parts of the city which came to mean something to Jewell during his time there (James told me that all of the stills in the film were taken during the first week of his moving to France!). Because of the films length, James is able to give more clarity to the stories of the people and places he features in his film, and present them in a more profound way.
“The interviews are for the most part conducted in the homes of those being interviewed, while others are filmed at a cafe, a bar, or a holiday dinner.”
As a final question, I asked James what he hopes one might take away from the film. “It’s two sided. On one side, an actual document of the physical place and what its like to be there and live there realistically to help someone to make a decision [about going there themselves]. The other side that I kind of really wanted to show was a portrait of a time and place, without the name Paris, and you took it all together, like one functioning thing – a collective. You get there and you are forced into this one thing which is indescribable, this one force that happens in Paris. That that one thing would be able to be captured somehow and you have an actual feeling of the reality of it.” In my watching of the film, I felt a little of that indescribable Paris-thing. I lived in Paris for one year as an English Assistant, and during that year I had a totally novel and magical experience which has never arrived from anywhere else. When I watch James' experience of Paris play out before me, memories of my time spent in the city come back to my consciousness, and once the film was over, I wanted to go back.
See more of James’s filmwork here.