Filmmaking
Weber's cinematic works—including his five feature-length films—often begin with a photo sitting. "All my films begin from finding someone I want to take a photograph of,"[25] Weber told the Sunday Times of London in 2008.
Broken Noses (1987)
While he was photographing the Olympic hopefuls for Interview Magazine in 1984, Weber met Andy Minsker, a young boxer from Oregon, and started interviewing him on camera. While he originally intended to make a short to accompany an exhibition he was opening in Paris, Weber became very excited when he reviewed the dailies and decided to continue the story. Broken Noses (1987), the resulting feature documentary, was nominated for the Grand Jury Award at Sundance in 1988.[26][27]
Let's Get Lost (1988)
As Weber was completing work on Broken Noses, he met the jazz trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker and began filming him, again with a mind to creating a short film based on their portrait sitting.[27] But filming with Baker continued right through the presentation of Broken Noses in Cannes that year—with Weber ultimately assembling the footage of travel, recording sessions, and interviews into his second feature, Let's Get Lost (1988). The film debuted in Venice (where it won the Cinecritica award) and was subsequently nominated for a Grand Jury Award at Sundance, and for an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.[27] Filming took a year with Weber approaching it, as he told The Times of London, "like his (Baker's) interpretation of a song, open-ended, not lyrical or strict."[28] The film features clips of Baker "in his prime in the 1950s...combined with his drug-damaged incarnation in the film's present day: gaunt and spaced out but still striking." Baker, Weber said, "was like a geyser in a national park. Exploding up and raining and raining back down, falling apart on everyone."[28]
Chop Suey (2001)
Chop Suey, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the wrestler Peter Johnson, was released in 2001.[29] The Sunday Times of London reviewed it as "an aesthetic autobiography, in which he ruminates on some of his heroes and inspirations."[30] According to a New York Times review at the time the film "moves easily between video and film and between black-and-white and color as Mr. Weber explores the world around him, a world that he finds full of beauty and erotic possibility. One of his most engaging discoveries is the 91-year-old Sir Wilfred, who as a young desert explorer made photographs of Bedouin tribesman that prefigure Mr. Weber's own work."[31]
A Letter to True (2004)
Weber released the impressionistic anti-war film A Letter to True in 2004, in the aftermath of 9/11, and addressed to one of Weber's beloved golden retrievers."[32][33] The film is an 'audiovisual scrapbook'[34] In a review of the film The Sunday Times of London details how Weber rhapsodises over some of his favourite people, memories and ideas. (He) is a shameless old softie for whom dogs are emblematic of a happy home, (and)‘cherishes domestic security amid the fear created by the…attacks."[35]
The Treasure of His Youth (2022)
Weber's fifth feature-length film focuses on the prominent Italian photojournalist Paolo Di Paolo, who was 94 when Weber began shooting the documentary.[36][37]
Short films
His work-in-progress Robert Mitchum feature, Nice Girls Don't Stay for Breakfast was screened at the New York Film Festival in 2017.[38] He has also directed seven short films: Beauty Brothers, Parts I-IV (1987), Backyard Movie (1991), Gentle Giants (1994), The Teddy Boys of the Edwardian Drape Society (1995), Wine and Cupcakes (2007), The Boy Artist (2008), and Liberty City is Like Paris to Me (2009).[27]
