… Each decision going forward was made, I don't want to say intuitively, but rapidly.” “There was a stark reality hanging over the project from the very beginning. “There was no research, no development period, we didn't raise money for a year and a half. He knew Sacks’ writing but only met him a week before shooting started. “The Oliver you see interviewed across the table from Ric or surrounded by his family and friends - all that sort of exhilaration, the brilliance, the self-deprecating humor, the eccentricities - that was so much what Oliver was like.”įor Burns, best known for the 1999 Emmy-nominated “New York: A Documentary Film,” the project was like nothing he’d worked on. “Honestly, the marathon week of filming in the apartment was exhilarating. Sacks didn’t live to see the finished film, but he put his full faith and trust in Burns. Sacks, with his 250cc Norton Motorcycle in 1956. “They had only five or six days to film, because he was scheduled for a surgery for his cancer the following week,” Hayes recalled. Within two weeks a film crew arrived at his home on Horatio Street in Manhattan’s West Village neighborhood to start shooting. Given Sacks’ diagnosis, everything moved quickly.

Sacks’ longtime editor and friend, Kate Edgar, was the one who reached out to Burns. You're such a wonderful reader, and we should get it down for posterity.’ And he liked that idea.” One night, not long after the diagnosis, someone said, ‘Oliver, we should videotape you reading from this book. He actually really liked to read from his work. He was reading passages from ‘On the Move’ with his friends and family - funny passages, tender passages, poignant passages.

“It wasn't as if Oliver set out to create a documentary,” said Bill Hayes, Sacks’ partner since 2009. He decided to spend part of that time working on a film about his life.

Oliver sacks book 1973