Courtney Stephens, Michael Almereyda Team For Doc On Controversial Scientist John C. Lilly

Matt Grobar
·2 min read
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EXCLUSIVE: Indie filmmakers Courtney Stephens and Michael Almereyda are teaming to direct a new documentary about controversial scientist John C. Lilly, Deadline has learned.

Funded by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the project will look at the countercultural figure’s work as the inventor of the isolation tank, as well as his pioneering studies of dolphin intelligence and support of psychedelics as a positive means for expanding consciousness. The storytelling will be supported by interviews with Lilly’s contemporaries and colleagues, as well as extensive archival records.

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Stephens was drawn to Lilly, having grown up near Marine World in the Bay Area, where the scientist worked with trained dolphins and computers in the early 1980s, hoping to teach the animals an Esperanto-like language that would allow for interspecies communication. Apple donated equipment to the lab, which was visited by figures ranging from Ram Dass to Olivia Newton John.

When Stephens first mentioned the project to Almereyda, he was mainly familiar with Lilly as the model for two Hollywood films, Mike Nichols’ The Day of the Dolphin (1973) and Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980). “It seemed clear to me,” said Almereyda, “that a person who can generate source material for such powerfully different movies is a person whose life and work were thoroughly fascinating, rich and strange.”

Stephens is best known for Terra Femme, a 2021 essay film exploring amateur film travelogues shot by women in the early 20th century. Pic premiered at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and has toured to over 60 museums, festivals and universities as a live performance.

On the documentary front, Almereyda most recently helmed Escapes, a look at the life of Blade Runner screenwriter Hampton Fancher, which was released by Grasshopper Films in 2017. He also recently wrote, directed and produced Tesla, a portrait of visionary inventor Nikola Tesla, starring Ethan Hawke, Kyle MacLachlan and Eve Hewson, which was released by IFC Films in 2020 after world premiering at Sundance. The filmmaker is otherwise best known for the sci-fi drama Marjorie Prime starring Jon Hamm, Geena Davis, Tim Robbins and Lois Smith; Experimenter, starring Peter Sarsgaard; and the Hawke-led features Cymbeline and Hamlet.

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