About The Film

Never Die: The Mad Genius of Barry Hannah will explore why Mississippi-born novelist and short story writer Barry Hannah, who has been cherished as an American literary master by luminaries like Philip Roth, Robert Altman, and John Grisham and enjoys a large following in France, is not better known to the American reading public. In answering that question the film will investigate the role of the writer in contemporary America as well as touch on larger questions of race, alcoholism, and the South all while following the life of an underappreciated, turbulent, and charismatic American artist: a man who once pulled a gun on his class, shot flaming arrows at his ex-wife’s window, saw Christ when (almost) dying of cancer, and whom Truman Capote deemed “the maddest man in American letters.”

About The Director

Nick Louvel has been a round-the-clock filmmaker since he first picked up a Video 8 camcorder at age eleven. After completing film programs at Tisch School of the Arts and BU College Of Communications, Louvel produced several featurettes for corporate clients such as Chase Manhattan Bank. He has also worked in development for Dimension Films and as a screenwriting assistant to Eric Warren Singer on Sony Pictures’s The International (2009). Louvel directed his first independent feature film, Domino One, while attending Harvard University from which he graduated cum laude in 2003. He is currently in post-production on his second feature film, Never Die, a documentary about fabled Mississippi writer Barry Hannah. Through his production company, Sandycape Films, Louvel freelances as a writer, director, and editor in New York City.

About The Writer

Jacob Rubin’s writing has appeared in the anthology Best New American Voices, New York Magazine, The New Republic, Slate, and The Cincinnati Review, among other publications. He holds a BA in Literature from Harvard College and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Mississippi, where he studied closely under Barry Hannah.