What happened, Miss Simone? Specifically, what happened to your big eyes that quickly veil to hide the loneliness? To your voice, that has so little tenderness, yet overflows with your commitment to the battle of Life? What happened to you?
—Maya Angelou in her 1970 profile of Nina Simone in Redbook magazine
Classically trained pianist, dive-bar chanteuse, black power icon, and legendary recording artist, Nina Simone lived a life of brutal honesty, musical genius, and tortured melancholy. In this amazing documentary, Academy Award-nominated director Liz Garbus interweaves never-before-heard recordings and rare archival footage together with Nina’s most memorable songs to create an unforgettable portrait of one of the least understood, yet most beloved, artists of our time. What Happened, Miss Simone? uses recently unearthed audiotapes, recorded over the course of three decades, of Nina telling her life story to various interviewers and would-be biographers. From over 100 hours of these recordings, the film weaves together Nina’s narrative, told largely in her own words. Rare concert footage and archival interviews, along with diaries, letters, interviews with Nina’s daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, friends and collaborators, along with other exclusive materials, make this the most authentic, personal, and unflinching telling of the life of one of the 20th century’s greatest recording artists. I sat down with Liz Garbus to talk about this remarkable film.
Danny Miller: Apart from all of the fascinating details about Nina Simone’s life and times, I was just flabbergasted by the artistry and emotion in her voice, even in her later years. It’s really one of the most amazing and unique voices I’ve ever heard.
Liz Garbus: Nina had so much suffering in her life and so much depth of emotion when she sang. I think anyone who listens to her sing can feel that.
I love the structure of the film. It almost feels like she’s telling her own story through modern interviews even though she died in 2003. Was that your intention from the beginning?
Yes, it was certainly our goal to make an archival film that feels as much like cinema verité as possible. Instead of running out and shooting a lot of interviews, editing those together, and then looking for archival footage to fill in the gaps, I turned that process on its head. There were certain things we knew we would get but then we’d find these treasure troves that you we ever dreamed we’d be lucky enough to find. It was a long process that included both heartbreak and wonderful discovery.
It must have been so exciting to find all of that footage of Nina talking so frankly about her life and her challenges.
I had made this film about Bobby Fisher who was extremely reclusive but I was much more optimistic in this case because Nina was so vulnerable and raw that when she liked someone, she really shared honestly. And then one day I had this lightbulb moment and remembered all these stories I’d heard that she had tried at different times of her life to co-author a memoir. She ultimately did that but there were three or four false starts and it took a long time but I tracked down some of the audiotapes made by those authors who were interviewing her for the books.
You had the full cooperation of her daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly. Did that give you an in with all the people you wanted to talk to?
With some that connection helped and with others it didn’t. Nina was a very divisive person during her lifetime. There are different camps with very different feelings about her. I would walk into certain meetings to talk about the film and I’d have to tell them I was like Switzerland — neutral!
I guess someone as outspoken as Nina Simone is going to burn some bridges in her lifetime.
Oh, definitely. She could be very rude to people. Some people were eager to repair those bridges, but some were not.
Still, no matter what their personal experience was with her, I’m sure no one would deny her incredible talent.
Well, in some cases you’d be surprised. A dark-skinned African American woman doing what she was doing at the time — being as political as she was, performing in a way that was so free and challenging while demanding a certain kind of respect — that was very threatening to some people. It wasn’t just that she could be rude and off-putting at times — she was a true radical and there were people who didn’t like that.
The song “Mississippi Goddam” alone was such a powerful statement and there was also that concert where she came close to advocating violence.
Yes, that was at the Harlem Renaissance Festival in 1969. In addition to singing, she read a poem called “Are You Ready?” by David Nelson which was used by the Black Panthers. That’s where Nina was at that point in her trajectory.
She must have been on every “enemy list” in Washington. It’s a miracle she wasn’t assassinated during those turbulent years.
I think she was fully aware of that possibility. Three days after Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered she sang her song, “Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)” and she said “They’re killing us off, one by one.” At that point she felt like she wanted to meet violence with violence but she ultimately saw that she could achieve so much more through her music.
She seems to have paid a big price in terms of her career and popularity in this country because of her radicalism.
The eldest Shabazz daughter, who is interviewed in the film, talked about the ways in which the civil rights movement had an impact on families. Of course in her own family they paid the ultimate price when they lost their father. But Nina paid a big price, too, including with her own family. She was a fierce, forward-thinking human being, but that fierceness caused a lot of problems in her personal life.
I so admire Lisa Simone Kelly and her brutal but compassionate honesty about her mother. She reveals some pretty horrifying things about her upbringing in the film but you can still feel the love as well as her concern for her mother’s legacy.
I was extremely impressed by Lisa and her ability to express both her love and her anger and to talk about what wasn’t acceptable as well as how much she cares about her mother’s music.
How do you think Nina is mostly remembered today?
Nina Simone is very different things to different people. For some people she’s a feminist icon, for others a civil rights activist. For some she’s just a really cool performer, and for others she’s just not known at all. She has never been as recognized here as she is in Europe and other places. But many American performers recognize her as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. There are many people today who acknowledge her as a huge influence on their work.
I was interested at her resistance at being called a “jazz” performer.
She used to say that “jazz is the white people’s word for when they don’t understand a black person’s music.” What was so brilliant about her is that she pulled on so many different traditions in ways that no one had done before — classical, jazz, soul, folk music, and so on.
The songs she wrote are amazing but some of those covers she did really blew me away like those two songs from the musical Hair.
Oh God, that is one of my all-time favorites. Her version of that song conjures up the entire history of slavery in America.
I wish I could have seen her live. Every single performance in the film is breathtaking.
Me, too! Luckily, there are lots of concerts that were filmed that we can all watch online.