“You could see through his work that he kept trying to find a way to approach [his experience in] Dresden creatively,” Weide reflects of Vonnegut’s lifelong process, perhaps best described as making sense of humanity in the glaring face of inhumanity.

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“It’s subtext in books like Cat’s Cradle; in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, the lead character Eliot Rosewater has this delusional daydream about Indianapolis being firebombed. In The Sirens of Titan there’s catastrophic battles with millions of people dying … He’s always trying to find a way to get at it … It wasn’t till Slaughterhouse-Five that he finally cracked the code.”

Weide’s film traces this arc with apt flashes back and forth in time, from a privileged family upbringing caught suddenly short by the Great Depression, to Vonnegut’s glory years as a critically lauded, and inevitably later savaged icon of the American literary establishment. But over 40 years of accumulation and procrastination – years of growing friendship, laughter and tears – time itself brought a twist to the story which the filmmaker resisted in vain.

“Often I resent when the author or the filmmaker puts themselves in [their work] and assumes everyone’s going to be interested in them or their relationship with their subject,” Weide says. “I was really reluctant to do this, because I didn’t want it to come off as … ‘Oh, Kurt Vonnegut and I were such great friends.’ I mean, who cares? But at a certain point, it really did seem to be the only way out of this hole I dug for myself.”

Especially after his subject’s death, from a fall outside his Manhattan home at the age of 84. Weide found himself so overwhelmed with the volume of material, and by his own entwined proximity to it, that writing himself into the narrative was “the only honest approach to take … To just pretend this was an objective author documentary would have made it a very dishonest film.”

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The gamble pays off to disarming effect as Weide comes unstuck too, in his own way and his own time. We share some of his joys – a happy marriage to actress Linda Bates, more films about his favourite comedians, directing the first five seasons of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm – but he also encounters enough personal sadness to bring the kind of perspective that only time travel can. In a film about one of the great humanists of our time, the effect is profoundly, well, humanising.

“Yeah, I think so,” Weide says. “In hindsight, as reluctant as I was to take this approach … I don’t know what the film would have been without it. You know, the number of letters and emails and messages I get from people telling me how moved they were and how much they cried during the film and how devastated they were at the end … I mean, to tell it through the eyes of a friend, I think it does make it more meaningful.”

It’s perhaps another mark of Vonnegut’s curiously pliable relationship with time that he never once asked his biographer when he was going to finish the film they spent 25 years ostensibly making. “He was pretty patient about it,” Weide says. “I mean, this is not meant to sound dismissive, but he really didn’t care whether or not the film went forward. There was one point where he suggested to me, ‘You know, why don’t we just scratch it?’ I said, ‘What, are you kidding?’”

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For Weide’s part, “I’m greatly relieved that it’s finished. It’s been two-thirds of my life, thinking about this film, worrying about it, trying to make it. I’m glad to finally have it out of my system and put it out there for the world to respond to it.

“It was a great excuse to get to meet him,” he adds. “Without having had the excuse of the film, there would have been no reason to write him and suggest that maybe we connect. You know, there’s that old adage about ‘Don’t meet your heroes’ but in this case, I have to say it worked out quite nicely.”

Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck In Time opens at Cinema Nova on July 7.