Jim Allison hadn’t been back to his hometown of Alice, TX, in 40 years when Bill Haney asked him to return there during the filming of “Jim Allison: Breakthrough.”
“I think, as is often the case with people who I make films with—it’s a voyage for discovery for them too,” said Haney, director, writer, and a producer of the documentary. “I think that Jim walking the streets where he was as a child, and where his brothers lived, and the school that he had been in, and the challenges he had at the school… reconnecting to it, it turned out, I think, to give Jim something, as well as I hope, the viewers something.”
Haney is a filmmaker, inventor, and entrepreneur.
Jim Allison’s personal connection to cancer, in losing his mother to lymphoma when he was young, as well as a brother to prostate cancer—a disease Allison has also survived—made the scientific aspects of “Jim Allison: Breakthrough” shine, Haney said.
“That determined individuality—and in Jim’s case with a sparkle of fun—creates a character that you can spend a lot of time with in Breakthrough,” he said. “That you feel a sense of care and you feel empathy not only for, but you feel empathy from. And so, I don’t think we could have made Breakthrough without Jim and I don’t think we would’ve wanted to.”
Why film a documentary about the development of immunotherapy in cancer?
“At a time when there’s a lot of pessimism about global climate change and income inequality, and immigration challenges, and the nature of democracy in America, for goodness sakes, here’s a really optimistic tale, where something we’ve been trying for 5,000 years to work on we’ve been succeeding,” Haney said.
There aren’t many documentaries about Nobel-winning scientists out there, Haney said.
“I think part of the reason for that is, where do you pitch the science? If you ask Jim—just make it a little simpler—he goes from genius to post doc with 12 years of experience,” Haney said.
Jim Allison helped make “Jim Allison: Breakthrough” work, in part, because he wasn’t concerned with his image on camera, and came across very naturally throughout filming.
“I’ve filmed a lot of folks, and some fantastic people, when the camera shows up, they freeze, they’re not emotionally open, they’re not comfortable in a conversation,” Haney said. “We need to have a journey of common humanity, and, and so when we really decided we were going to stick with this was after we filmed him for the first two, three days.”
On the day Bill Haney wrapped up filming of Jim: Allison: Breakthrough, it was announced that Jim Allison won the Nobel Prize.
“That made us want to accelerate finishing the films, including going to Stockholm and putting this thing in. We made the movie in about a year and that’s a fast schedule for a [documentary], especially for somebody like me, who’s got a couple of other jobs,” Haney said. “We are really happy that we were the number one film on PBS last year in terms of viewers, and I think that’s a good example where Jim winning the Nobel helped. It didn’t change the filmmaking, but it probably changed the footprint of the film.”
Read the transcript here: https://cancerhistoryproject.com/article/bill-haney-making-of-jim-allison-breakthrough/