The filmmaker explains why the generosity of others made the documentary a reality.
“Every project comes with mountains that need to be climbed. They often include archival content. The acquisition of clearances was epic on this project and could have been prohibitively expensive if every single person we went to hadn’t responded to us with love and generosity,” enthused R.J. Cutler, the award-winning filmmaker behind Belushi. “Folks who could have charged us and would have every right to charge us, an arm and a leg for material, but they charged us a cuticle. Lennon and McCartney basically gave away the store. Lorne Michaels, the folks at Universal, the list goes on and on, they could have all charged us the earth, but they love John, and they gave from their hearts. This documentary would not have been made had that not been the case.” Belushi uses previously unheard audio interviews with Dan Aykroyd, Penny Marshall, Lorne Michaels, Carrie Fisher, and Harold Ramis, among others, to provide a unique insight into the life of the legendary comedian, John Belushi. It also examines his fight for sobriety and struggles with addiction. “My producing partner, John Battsek, and I decided that we wanted to make a film about John Belushi, Cutler explained. “For many years, he’d been pursuing his wife, Judy, and she had been putting him off for many years, but she kept saying she didn’t think the time was right. So, he and I went off and made another film together about Marlon Brando. When that was done, we went to lunch and talked about what we might do next and wondered if maybe now Judy would think the time was right. He reached out to her, and she said she was open to it. We went to Martha’s Vineyard, and we spent time with Judy, long days walking around with her and sitting on the edge of the cliff that we see in the movie, overlooking the ocean. She told me stories about her and John’s life together, and we got to know each other. That was when Judy invited us to look through John’s archive, which she was going to give us access to in the making of this film.” “In that collection, there were many extraordinary things that we were not expecting. There were John’s letters, and we hadn’t realized that he had been such a prolific letter writer. For a man who was so private, he was extremely forthcoming in those. We also discovered these audiotapes, which of course, Judy knew existed, but she had put away having utilized them for a book she’d published, which was an oral history of John’s life. But the book was the tip of the iceberg for the tapes, and nobody had ever heard them. The book was a tiny fraction of what the tapes contained. We took those tapes, arranged for the transfer, and listened to them, and in those audio tapes, I discovered the foundation for the film.
