Not everything gets made. I Am Jenny is the one I still think about.
Jenny was 64 and had lost her voice to Huntington’s disease. We had a way to give it back to her. Not an approximation of a voice, but her own, rebuilt from recordings, so that she could read her own journals aloud. Her family were behind it. She was behind it.
We took it out. We could not find a commissioner.
I understand the reasons. It is a small, quiet, difficult film about an illness that frightens people, and it arrived at a moment when anything with a synthetic voice attached to it made buyers nervous. Every no was reasonable on its own terms. The sum of reasonable noes is still a film that does not exist.
I have made my peace with most of the projects that fell over. Not this one. Everything we did afterwards at Deep Fusion worked because we could point at a principle and say this is what the technology is actually for. I Am Jenny was the clearest example of that principle we ever had, and it is the one nobody got to see.
If you commission documentaries and this sounds like something worth talking about, you know where I am.
Related: Virtually Parkinson, the Deep Fusion project that did get made.
