{"id":23742,"date":"2019-09-07T07:09:54","date_gmt":"2019-09-07T14:09:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qgp.ykq.mybluehost.me\/cinephiled\/?p=23742"},"modified":"2019-11-02T12:37:28","modified_gmt":"2019-11-02T19:37:28","slug":"interview-directors-powerful-doc-linda-ronstadt-sound-voice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinephiled.com\/interview-directors-powerful-doc-linda-ronstadt-sound-voice\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview: Directors of the Powerful Doc \u2018Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since bursting onto the music scene in 1967, Linda Ronstadt has been an icon for more than half a century. Her extraordinary vocal range created iconic songs across rock, pop, country, folk ballads, American standards, classic Mexican music, and soul. As the most popular female recording artist of the 1970s, Ronstadt filled huge arenas and produced an astounding 11 Platinum albums. Ronstadt was the first artist to top the Pop, Country, and R&B charts at the same time. She won 10 Grammy Awards on 26 nominations and attained a level of stardom the Tucson native never could have imagined.<\/p>\n

\"ronstadt-poster\"In Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice,\u00a0<\/em>Ronstadt guides us through her early years of singing Mexican canciones <\/em>with her family, her folk days with the Stone Poneys, and her reign as the Queen of Rock throughout the 70s and early 80s. She was a pioneer for women in the male-dominated music industry and a passionate advocate for human rights. Even more attention was heaped upon her when she had a long-term and high-profile romance with California Governor Jerry Brown. In recent years, her incredible voice has been lost to Parkinson\u2019s disease, something she accepts with a dignity and grace that is\u00a0inspiring, but her music and influence remain as timeless as ever. With incredible performance footage and heartwarming appearances by friends and collaborators such as Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt, and Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice\u00a0<\/em>celebrates an artist whose desire to share the music she loved made generations of fans fall in love with her.<\/p>\n

It was a thrill for me to sit down with the award-winning\u00a0directors of this film, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (The Times of Harvey Milk, Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, The Celluloid Closet<\/em>) and producer James Keach (Walk the Line, Glen Campbell: I\u2019ll Be Me, David Crosby: Remember My Name<\/em>) to discuss this deeply moving and joyously\u00a0entertaining film.<\/p>\n

\"Rob

Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman<\/p><\/div>\n

Danny Miller: Your previous documentaries\u00a0are legendary. Did you feel this film\u00a0was a natural progression from the kinds of things you were doing? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Jeffrey Friedman:<\/strong>\u00a0I think so. This is ultimately a story about a woman\u2019s empowerment, and that\u2019s thematically not very far from other themes that we\u2019ve taken on.<\/p>\n

Did it take a while to earn Linda Ronstadt\u2019s trust before she agreed to do the film?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Oh God, yes. It took about a year to convince her to let us do it!<\/p>\n

Yeah, she doesn\u2019t seem like someone who would necessarily be down for a film about herself. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Rob Epstein:\u00a0<\/strong>Fortunately, she had just seen my film The Times of Harvey Milk\u00a0<\/em>and really liked it, so the timing of that was fortuitous. But as Jeffrey said, she was very reluctant and it took a long time\u00a0to get her to come around. She basically told us that she thought we were deluded and that nobody would want to see the film\u00a0and if they did, they\u2019d be bored to tears.<\/p>\n

Oh, Linda, Linda. That\u2019s totally insane!<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jeffrey Friedman:\u00a0<\/strong>But after a while, a couple of things conspired to change her mind. The people who were still working with her were rooting for us \u2014 her longtime assistant and good friend Janet Stark and her manager John Boylan were encouraging us behind the scenes to keep going. We told Linda that we wanted to use her wonderful book as source material but we wanted to amplify it by having an audience actually experience the music that’s only described in the\u00a0book. She finally started to allow herself to imagine that.<\/p>\n

\"ronstadt2\"Did she have any ground rules about what she didn\u2019t want you to put in the film?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rob Epstein:\u00a0<\/strong>Linda is a very private person and she didn\u2019t want us to get into her personal relationships which we totally understood.<\/p>\n

With the exception of Jerry Brown?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jeffrey Friedman:\u00a0<\/strong>Yes, well, that\u2019s in her book and anything she talked about in the book was fair game. Linda and Governor Brown are still friends.<\/p>\n

Rob Epstein:\u00a0<\/strong>We really just wanted to help make her musical journey come alive in the film. But she also said she wouldn\u2019t be interviewed for the film.<\/p>\n

Are you saying that all of her voiceovers in the film are taken from other interviews? <\/strong><\/p>\n

We did use dozens of different sources but in the end she finally agreed to sit down for an interview.<\/p>\n

Jeffrey Friedman:\u00a0<\/strong>But that one was only an audio interview, we didn\u2019t film it.<\/p>\n

And yet she does appear on camera at the end of the film, and it\u2019s such a beautiful, poignant scene. Was it always the plan that we wouldn\u2019t see her until the end?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rob Epstein:\u00a0<\/strong>It was always our intention to somehow bring it to the present tense. We were very frank with her about that, we told her that the audience would want to see her today. We talked about the possibility of having her come into a recording studio and read passages from her book but she thought that was just too artificial. And then all of a sudden, she had this trip planned to Mexico with her family and she invited us.\u00a0But that happened way at the end.<\/p>\n

Jeffrey Friedman:\u00a0<\/strong>By that time we had interviewed so many people that she was very close to\u00a0and they were like her spies telling her everything that happened \u2014 they all assured her that we were doing a very respectful portrait.<\/p>\n

I found the entire film so incredibly moving. I could tell you that I cried at points but it\u2019s more like tears were pouring down my face during\u00a0every single song. I can\u2019t even fully understand why it\u00a0affected me so much. Something about the purity of her voice and the purity\u00a0<\/strong>of her relationship to her music and the way she navigated through her superstardom without ever getting sucked into the negative aspects of that.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rob Epstein:\u00a0<\/strong>I think it was surprising to all of us how humble she is and self-deprecating. She never had much interest in being a celebrity and she managed to maintain her authentic personhood throughout all of the different iterations of her fame and career. She certainly never tried to create any persona around \u201cLinda Ronstadt,\u201d she was always just herself, the same person that she is to this day.<\/p>\n

Jeffrey Friedman:\u00a0<\/strong>Yeah, she’s very real, no bullshit. I think that’s part of what makes watching her sing\u00a0so touching, because it’s really just her and the music coming through her. It was never about showmanship or flash and dazzle, just an authentic artistic expression. I think that\u2019s why audiences have responded to her with such enthusiasm and emotion throughout her career.<\/p>\n

\"James

James Keach<\/p><\/div>\n

James Keach:\u00a0<\/strong>But I\u2019m not sure she was never \u201csucked into\u201d the fame part, I think she was sucked into it many times. The difference was that she always pushed back. She would get pulled into things like those big arena concerts and then come realize that it wasn\u2019t what she wanted to do. But I would speculate that\u00a0your emotional reaction to the film might also be because those were better days for a lot of us in many ways. I feel like they were better days in my life, a lot\u00a0more simple and fun! They were certainly\u00a0the best days of my life in terms of music. I also tear up now when I hear Linda sing and some of the other\u00a0performers from back then because it\u00a0brings back that different part of my life\u00a0even though so much time has gone by. I find it very touching.<\/p>\n

\"ronstadt-fans\"<\/p>\n

Right. And yet Linda herself was going through a lot of insecurities at the time and trying to figure out what she wanted. I remember going to see her in The Pirates of Penzance\u00a0<\/em>on Broadway in the 1980s and wondering how they \u201clet\u201d one of the most famous singers in the country do that. I so admired her determination to branch out in areas that were hardly as lucrative as what she could\u2019ve kept doing for the rest of her life. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Rob Epstein:\u00a0<\/strong>There was an article I read about her from that time where she was speculating on whether she would ever be happy. The truth is she just wanted to sing. For her it wasn\u2019t about being a huge rock star or the girlfriend of George Lucas or Jerry Brown, she just wanted to be in the living room with her friends singing. But she also knew there were dues she had to pay in order to be Linda Ronstadt.<\/p>\n

I love all the interviews in the film. Was it challenging to get all of those amazing, busy people to be in the film?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jeffrey Friedman:\u00a0<\/strong>Well, Linda is very loved so it wasn\u2019t that hard to get people to say yes. And James was a great producer along with his partner Michele Farinola, and they just never gave up until we got all the people we wanted.<\/p>\n

I was especially glad to see Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton in the film, their collaborations with Linda were pure magic. <\/strong><\/p>\n