All in the mind

" He was born, he thought, he died." That, Heidegger once contended, is all we need to know about any great philosopher. What matters is on the page, in the work: the rest is simply anecdote or speculation. Jacques Derrida, the 72-year-old French philosopher and "father of deconstruction", agrees. "Somebody who reads a text by a philosopher – even a tiny paragraph – and interprets it in a rigorous, inventive and powerfully deciphering fashion is more of a biographer than one who knows the whole story," he recently declared in a lecture at New York University.

Both the above quotes feature in Derrida, the new documentary by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman. Not that they stop Dick and Kofman from delving into their subject's domestic life, poring over the details of his upbringing, and even rifling through his bookshelves, where, much to their surprise, they find a copy of Anne Rice's Interview With a Vampire. (Derrida looks just the slightest bit bashful as he explains that this was one of many books given to him when he was lecturing on "Vampirism and Eating the Other". And, no, he hasn't read it.)

The documentary provides a potted CV of Derrida while also showing us snapshots of the famous thinker off duty: To sum up "the life" in brief: Jacques Derrida was born in 1930 to a Sephardic Jewish family in what was then French Algeria. He was expelled from school when he was 10 years old because he was "Jewish" and the Vichy authorities were kowtowing to the Nazis, doing their dirty work for them. (This, Dick and Kofman speculate, was the defining event of his childhood. His distrust of authority and his ferocious vigilance against anti-Semitism, however covert, stem from the early trauma.) He wrote his first novel at the age of 15. As an adolescent, he dreamed of being a professional soccer player. He had the chance to become a movie star when offered a role in a Marguerite Duras film, but turned it down. He has published over 45 books and is probably the most famous philosopher living today.

So far, so banal. We see Derrida buttering his toast as his wife Marguerite unloads the dishwasher. We hear his brother René marvelling at his brilliance. ("We were not an intellectual family. Not at all," he states in disbelief.) We see Derrida eating crisps and drinking champagne. Marguerite talks about her first meeting with him, one snowy day long ago. We see him fiddling with his pen on the desk while he makes a telephone call and watching a TV monitor showing footage from the documentary of him watching a TV monitor... What the film doesn't reveal is just why he agreed to participate in such a project, or why Dick and Kofman wanted to make it.

Kofman (who had the idea for the film in 1994) claims she just wanted to capture a philosopher she reveres on camera. An intense and strikingly elegant LA-based academic in her late thirties, she speaks about Derrida with the kind of awe bobbysoxers used to reserve for Frank Sinatra. "One of the drives of making this movie was, my God, how do people like this exist? His mind is so incredible," she enthuses."

She first met him in the 1980s when she studied under him at Yale. "I was very intimidated. I had been immersed in his work prior to meeting him. He was very professional and very pedagogical. Lectures started on the minute and there wasn't much small talk beforehand," she recalls. "In the seminars I never spoke. What I mean is that I was too scared to speak."

When she approached him with the idea of making a film, he invited her to write a proposal. She did so, and much to her surprise, he agreed to co-operate. For three years, whenever she could afford to, she shot footage. Soon, she had a small mountain of material, but wasn't sure what to do with it. In 1997, after seeing Kirby Dick's documentary Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist, she approached Dick to see if he would help her.

They make an odd couple. She is an Ivy League academic, he is an award-winning film-maker with a taste for the polemical and the extreme. They admit that they had "strong disagreements" along the way. Dick insisted that his name went first on the credits. "But I thought our collaboration worked phenomenally well, we respected and listened to each other," she insists now.

How do you make philosophy cinematic? "That was the great challenge," Dick reflects. "But when Amy showed me the footage before I came on, I said, 'We have our star.' Jacques was very striking both in person and – more importantly to us – on film. And I'm not necessarily certain that philosophy is inherently uncinematic. One of the things that we were banking on is that there's a sizable audience that's prepared to listen to philosophy in film and be thrilled by it in a sense. We realised this very early on in our screenings, people were riveted even if we hadn't solved the cinematic problems of the film."

Kofman and Dick use the conventions of the typical documentary portrait, but only, they claim, in a self-conscious and ironic way. "We tried to create this interweave and shift, between the day-to-day experiences of Derrida as a person, with his philosophy, so that both these levels were at play all the way through," Dick notes.

It helped that the philosopher was fond of Kofman. "There was a certain vulnerability coming from Amy which maybe caused him to reach out more. He had more of a rapport with her – she's respectful, but a lot of people have let that respect put a certain limit on their exploration. She continually stepped over a line and that allowed a certain intimacy – to see a certain side of Derrida that you would never see any anywhere else."

The French sage, it soon turns out, is (in his own words) "a little narcissist". For all his remarks about the "complete artificiality of the interview situation", he enjoys Kofman's curiosity about him. It's fascinating, too, to watch him in action. When she asks him a question, however trivial, there's a brief pause as he cogitates and his mind clicks into gear, and then he delivers a provocative, perfectly formulated answer. The film-makers acknowledge that attempting to deconstruct the deconstructivist was always likely to prove "problematic". Just when they think they've got a handle on their subject, he invariably wriggles out of their grasp. That, though, becomes part of the pleasure of the documentary. It's an elaborate dance in which he is more nimble than they are.

Kofman admits that the process was frustrating. ("There are axioms of contention all over," she says, her jargonistic way of saying she occasionally disagreed with him.) When she asks him what aspect of a philosopher he'd most like to see explored in a documentary, he fires back "the sex life". This, of course, is the one part of his own life he's let Kofman and Dick nowhere near. Dick was startled by the answer. For Kofman, it's exactly what she expected. "He's saying that the revelation he'd most like to have is particularly what he's not giving us. That's quintessential Derrida."

'Derrida' is released on 31 January