Neal Jimenez, the writer-director behind a string of acclaimed films in the 1980s and 1990s, including the thriller “River’s Edge” and his directorial debut, the semi-autobiographical drama “The Waterdance,” died Dec. 11 from heart failure, his family has announced. He was 62.
Paralyzed in a hiking accident while he was a student at UCLA in 1984, Jimenez paved the way for disability representation with “The Waterdance,” the 1992 drama starring Eric Stoltz as a writer struggling to recover after being paralyzed from the neck down. Based in part on his own recovery, the film was released to critical acclaim and won Best First Feature and Best Screenplay at the 1992 Independent Spirit Awards.
Jimenez also wrote the screenplays for “For the Boys” (1991), “Sleep With Me” (1994) and “Hideaway” (1995 among other things.)
“My brother had a passion for writing and creating. The clack of typing seemed to daily come through his bedroom walls. He had drawers full of typed pages and journals filled with his words and ink doodles. He wrote then because he had to, he needed to and he wanted to,” Jimenez’s sister, Elizabeth Rathjen said in a statement. “I always imagined walking into a bookstore and seeing books authored by my brother. Instead it was a video store and movies. As far back as I can remember, my brother would make short movies on Super 8 with his friends. He spent hours cutting and splicing film together. He seemed to know how he wanted the film to look. Neal had an easy intelligence and a great wit. He enjoyed movies, books and music and wanted others to enjoy those things too.”
“His writing voice is seductive, powerful, and wholly unique,” Michael Steinberg, Jimenez’s co-director on ‘The Waterdance,” said in a statement “Like a complex minor chord with a range that could move in any direction. Dark, hilarious, romantic, political, gritty, fantastical, poetic. In the 40 years since meeting Neal, I’ve worked with dozens of big names and huge talents. But only a handful of true, genius-level artists. Jimenez, like Tarantino, and The Farrelly Brothers, had a voice strong enough to bend cinema.”
Jimenez was born May 22, 1960 in Sacramento to Mexican American parents who owned and operated a Shell Station. He began his career writing for a local weekly paper, “The Grapevine Independent” before beginning his university education at Santa Clara University. He eventually transferred to UCLA to study film and while there wrote his first screenplay, “River’s Edge.”
Produced in 1986 and directed by Tim Hunter, “River’s Edge” was described as perhaps “the darkest teen movie of all time,” and had an enormous influence on subsequent popular culture, if only for helping to propel the careers of several rising stars, among them Keanu Reeves. It was celebrated by critics and notable for its groundbreaking soundtrack featuring punk and metal acts of the era.
But prior to the production of that film, Jimenez suffered a severe personal setback, when in 1984 he slipped and fell while hiking and woke to find he was paralyzed from the neck down. After a grueling recovery Jimenez regained movement in his upper body; he remained a paraplegic and used a wheelchair.
In a statement, “The Waterdance” star Eric Stoltz said, ”Neal Jimenez was a funny, talented, and complex (‘but adorable!’, I can hear him say) writer and director, and I will miss his unique voice. He made our work a joy, and was the rare man who would speak the truth to my face, even when it wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I was often amazed at all he got away with, simply by adding his patented impish smile and shrug at the end of a sentence. It goes without saying — though Neal would require I do — that our industry has lost one of the most deeply gifted and unconventional voices of the independent film movement.”