“You’re looking back on your life from the perspective of someone who can’t eat, can’t speak, and has been compromised in some ways-though not intellectually, or creatively.

“The gist of my pitch was: I loved your memoir, and I love the way you look back on your life through this prism of your life now,” says James.

Thus began a flurry of back-and-forth emails between director and subject. There were, by his guess, “several other people circling Roger” with the idea of adapting his memoir into a documentary film. “He thought, Really? A documentary on a film critic?” “From my first email exchange with him, he wasn’t convinced that he warranted a documentary,” says James. But first, James had to gain his would-be subject’s approval. It was a cinematic tale, to say the least. Told with Ebert’s trademark introspection, it traced the affable curmudgeon’s life story from his early newspaper days as a randy boozehound to his rise up the film critics’ ranks to the thyroid cancer that claimed his lower jaw and stripped the wordsmith of the ability to speak.

“He is a significant film critic, but it’s his life that makes it an amazing story,” James tells me at the Nantucket Film Festival. By James’ estimation, they’d met “less than 10 times since.” Though they weren’t pals, James was friendly with the fellow Chicagoan, having first crossed paths at the 1993 Toronto Film Festival where he’d brought his aforementioned basketball doc (Ebert would later rank it the best film of the ’90s). It was the spring of 2012 when Steve James, the documentary filmmaker behind Hoop Dreams and The Interrupters, was approached by Steven Zaillian, the Oscar-winning writer of Schindler’s List, and his producing partner Garrett Basch, to adapt Ebert’s bestselling memoir Life Itself.

Life itself by roger ebert