Jeff Feuerzeig | Writer Director

Jeff Feuerzeig is an award winning director and non-fiction filmmaker whose feature film The Devil and Daniel Johnston won top documentary directing honors at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival and was distributed theatrically by Sony Pictures Classics. The film, which has developed a large cult following, is a compelling portrait of a schizophrenic musician and outsider artist who overcame his private demons -- many of them quite literal in the subject's own mind -- to develop an avid international following. Combining techniques drawn from the documentary canon (Feuerzeig has worked with Albert Maysles, and others) and the New Journalism of the 1970s (the creation of first-person POV and internal monologue through audio cassette letters, journal entries, home movies, etc.), the film presents one of the finest portraits available of what writer and clinical psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison has labeled the artist "touched with fire," and the connective tissue that links genius to madness.

As New York Observer film critic Matt Zoller Seitz declared of Devil: "A true nonfiction film, a movie that tries to do with sound and image what journalists like Nick Tosches (Dino) and Norman Mailer (Armies of the Night) tried to do with prose, bending prose into poetry to find a more subjective route to truth."

Coming out of the fertile early ‘80s punk and independent music underground and its pervasive do-it-yourself aesthetic, Feuerzeig began his career as a film editor before successfully transitioning to commercial directing. In 1993, his independently produced and self-financed first feature Half Japanese: The Band That Would Be King, a loving documentary portrait of the cult band, was distributed theatrically in art-house cinemas nationwide, expanding a personal passion project into a humorous yet ultimately heartfelt valentine to the kind of fringe artists who often deserve but rarely receive anything like it.

As Stephen Holden wrote in the New York Times, "But underneath [this] pose burns a fiercely anti-establishment passion and an anarchic teen-age spirit that insists on the ultimate value of noise for noise's sake."

Continuing to push the boundaries of non-fiction, Feuerzeig has written the screenplays God Bless Tiny Tim (with Julien Nitzberg), a feature biopic about the legendary crooner of "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" fame and The Bayonne Bleeder (with Jerry Stahl), a feature biography of boxer Chuck Wepner, who in 1975 went 15 rounds with Muhammad Ali and inspired the Sylvester Stallone film Rocky. Liev Schreiber is attached to star in the latter.

Feuerzeig recently completed The Real Rocky, a one-hour special for ESPN Films acclaimed 30 for 30 series, which views the Chuck Wepner story through the documentary lens. He also directed The Dude for USA Network's "Character Series", an 18-minute documentary short about Jeff "The Dude" Dowd, a legendary producer's rep who became the basis for the Coen Brothers' cult film The Big Lebowski. In 2012 The Dude was selected as a Vimeo Staff Pick and became a viral sensation across the internet.

PRAISE FOR "The Devil & Daniel Johnston"

• "The Devil and Daniel Johnston is a masterpiece that will haunt you long after you've left the theater."

  - Mira Jeff, Ain't It Cool News

• "Jeff Feuerzeig's tremendous documentary runs on the motive force of intelligent fandom and radiates an ineffable grace."

  - Jessica Winter, Village Voice

• "The most harrowing and aesthetically keen portrait of madness and artistic inspiration since Crumb."

  - Noel Murray, Onion A.V. Club

• "A thoroughly engrossing look at music and madness. As nakedly emotional as it is startling."

  - Bruce Diones, The New Yorker

• "The razor's edge of art and madness."

  - John Anderson, Newsday

• "A moving portrait of the artist as his own ghost."

  - Dana Stevens, NY Times

• "A true nonfiction film, a movie that tries to do with sound and image what journalists like Nick Tosches (Dino) and Norman Mailer (Armies of the Night) tried to do with prose, bending prose into poetry to find a more subjective route to truth."

  - Matt Zoller Seitz, NY Press

• "Like watching the dysfunctional families of Crumb and Capturing the Friedmans."

  - Robert Horton, Seattle Herald

• "It's the way Feuerzeig walks with him on the line between creativity and madness that digs this haunting and hypnotic film into your memory."

  - Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

• "Opens a window on the nature of art and the power of myth. A hot line to the REAL!"

  – Greg Burke, LA Weekly

• "As a stylist, Feuerzeig is a man of rare talent and startlingly original storytelling. If Johnston is Joe Buck, Feuerzeig is his rambling, audacious Enrico Rizzo."

  - Chris Cabin, Contactmusic.com

• "The Devil feels like something a brilliant schizophrenic might produce during a rare period of clarity."

  - Matt Zoller Seitz, NY Press

• "The Devil and Daniel Johnston is a documentary that will haunt you all the way home, and into the night."

  - Kurt Loder, MTV

• "The picture is something of a ballad, an ode to an elusive character who's both quintessentially human and so outlandish he almost seems unreal."

  - Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com

• "Everything a good documentary should be - is a story of family, friendship, art and fame, as seen through the prisms of exceptional beauty and deepest pain."

  - Elizabeth Weitzman, NY Daily News

• "The Devil and Daniel Johnston is a documentary with all the suspense, comedy, pathos and surprise of a great narrative film. It is unfailingly fascinating and tremendously entertaining."

  - John Beifuss, Memphis Online

• "The rare documentary possessed with an artistry that transcends its subject."

  - Chris Vognar, Dallas Morning News

• "Dare I say even Dave Eggers would consider this film a heartbreaking work of staggering genius?"

  - Mira Jeff, Ain't It Cool News

• "Devil leads us into that dark, uncharted valley where evil, genius, divine inspiration, insanity -- and other unfathomable mysteries -- commingle."

  - Desson Thomson, Washington Post

• "The Devil and Daniel Johnston somehow has the power to be both emotionally resonant and completely entertaining. A definitive statement of an artist who can't get rid of the monsters in his head."

  - Chris Cabin, Contactmusic.com