My Friend Paul - The Story


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Paul featured in Jonathan's '70s Super 8 movies

When filmmaker Jonathan Berman was growing up in the middle class suburbs of Long Island, his best friend Paul was always the wildest of their bunch. Jonathan made Super 8 films and Paul was his star, playing the ninja, the mobster, the dangerous underdog going down in a hail of bullets. When everyone was wearing bell-bottoms and smoking pot in their parent's rec room, Paul was doing hard drugs and losing his virginity to a Manhattan prostitute. Twenty years later, the '70s long since over, Jonathan is a filmmaker in New York and Paul is finishing his sentence after serving time for eleven bank robberies. MY FRIEND PAUL is Berman's moving account of their troubled reunion.

As the film opens, Jonathan is trying to write a gothic comedy but getting nowhere fast. He gets a call from his old friend Paul and decides that the always electric Paul is just the jolt that his life and career needs. The two plan to make a film together about Paul but whether it will be the next SCARFACE or a documentary is up in the air.

Imagine one of De Niro's characters if he'd gone to Yale and read too much Nietzsche - that's Paul. Alternately manic and charming, volatile and movingly desperate, Paul has clearly evolved from the wild kid of Jonathan's memory into someone else. When Paul jumps bail and shows up on his doorstep, Jonathan soon realizes that he's in way over his head - Paul is not just quirky but seriously mentally ill. The prison psychiatrists diagnose Paul as bipolar (manic-depressive) and put him on medication. But when Paul arrives in New York, he's off the medicine and in an agitated state.

Paul and Jonathan in New York

Paul returns to prison because of his mental state, and Jonathan continues to film him. His trips to film Paul - whether motivated by loyalty or the fact his "gangster" friend is a good documentary subject - rekindle the intimacy and easiness that only childhood friendships foster. When Paul comes to stay with Jonathan and his manic rantings threaten the filmmaker's own equilibrium, he begs Paul to return to the psychiatric hospital. The artistry and integrity of this story lies in the unflinching eye that Jonathan turns on his own waxing and waning discomfort and affection for his distraught friend. His memories of the freedom of their youth and the reality of Paul's illness conflict, as he struggles to accept that both of their creativity and wildness come from the same place.

Combining old Super 8 movies, interviews with Paul's mother, step-brother and other members of their Long Island crowd, and cinema verité footage of Jonathan and Paul today, MY FRIEND PAUL is a haunting and unsettling meditation on friendship and life on the edge.

"As we continued the film, it became clearer to me that maybe he really did have a mental illness. This brought me to some interesting moral questions. Is it O.K. to continue making the film? When should I stop shooting? Then I realized that the film could portray the issues no one talks about, the issues that should be talked about. I felt that I could address his mental illness and marginalization in a real way, without any experts at all, but just as a person, a friend. So rather than being an objective study of his illness, the film became about what I really know and feel - my reaction to Paul."

- Jonathan Berman

Update on Paul
As of May, 2000, Paul is still in a Massachusetts psychiatric hospital, awaiting available space in a community halfway house.