An epic snowstorm;
permission to shoot on a historic site that had been closed to the
public for 60 years; and the availability and willingness of Robert De
Niro: those were the impossible ingredients that the artist JR needed to
make his short film. For most first-time filmmakers, the bar would seem
too high.
But JR, the Frenchman known for his large-scale street photography who has lately branched off into other artistic fields, like ballet,
pulled it off. The result is a 14-minute film, “Ellis,” set in the
formerly abandoned hospital on Ellis Island, which was once a way
station for immigrants. It’s also the site of JR’s recent installation “Unframed – Ellis Island,”
in which he and his team pasted archival images of immigrants in the
very rooms they passed through during the great wave of migration in the
early 20th century.
The film, with a scripted voiceover written by the Oscar winner Eric Roth (“Forrest Gump”) and music by the French songwriter Woodkid,
follows Mr. De Niro as he walks through the hospital, which was
abandoned in 1954 and stands as a ruin, with broken windows and rusted
lockers. “It was very eerie,” Mr. De Niro said at the film’s New York
premiere on Friday on the Lower East Side. It will run Wednesday-Sunday
through Nov. 8 in a pop-up exhibition
sponsored by Galerie Perrotin, JR’s dealer, at 130 Orchard Street. (His
photos and some works on wood will also be on display.)
Instead of posting the short online, JR, a star of social media, is offering to send a copy of the film free to people who want to screen it in small groups. (Details are here.)
He is also organizing free showings in London, Los Angeles, San
Francisco and at Miami Art Basel. “The idea of the film is not to make
any money, but just try to get people to see it,” he said.
JR was first inspired
to make the film as a way to document the crumbling hospital. “A lot of
the places you see in the film have decayed so much, you can’t see them
anymore,” he said Friday. He also wanted to highlight its connection to
the current global battles over migration, by including photos of
contemporary undocumented United States immigrants, scattered among the
collages of faces from a century ago.
For Mr. De Niro, who
said in an interview that he wasn’t sure if any of his family members
had come through Ellis Island, the motivation was simpler. “JR asked me
to do it and Jane asked me to do it,” he said, referring to Jane
Rosenthal, his partner in Tribeca Film, “and I said O.K.” He and JR have
collaborated on several projects, though it has been years since Mr. De
Niro agreed to do a short. “I think JR is very personable and likable
and smart, and generates enthusiasm,” he said.
Traveling to Ellis
Island is an undertaking, involving passports and ferries, and Mr. De
Niro arrived with little advance notice, for just half a day, from the
set of the David O. Russell film “Joy” in Boston last winter. The small
“Ellis” crew scrambled. There was no time for rehearsal, but the snow
was fresh. “Everything could have gone wrong, and that’s it, and there
would be no movie,” JR said. Instead, “we got really focused.”
“And there was Bob, in the middle of a storm,” he added. “It was magical.”
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