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“The Biggest Challenge Was That Janis Has Led an Incredibly Interesting and Varied Life”: Director Varda Bar-Kar on Janis Ian: Breaking Silence
Janice Ian: Breaking Silence Even if you don’t count yourself has a diehard Janis Ian fan, the singer-songwriter’s songs, such as her 1967 hit “Society’s Child,” when they appear in Varda Bar-Kar’s compelling bio-doc, Janis Ian: Breaking Silence, will strike a memory chord, so ubiquitous they have been across radio playlists for more than half a century. It’s a real strength of Bar-Kar’s film, which is organized around several of Ian’s most memorable albums, including the eponymous 1993 release, that she weaves these compositions into a rich fabric that places Ian’s personal life story — her coming out, her relationship with and 2003 marriage to Patricia Snyder, financial disasters and contemporary recognition as an LGBTQ icon — within the larger context of social and music business change during these years. Indeed, an early high point in the film is its sequence about the recording of “Society’s Child,” which makes clear how radical a message this song delivered across staid airwaves in 1967. As Bar-Kar does throughout the film, these moments are illustrated with copious recreations — bursts of imagery in which a series of actresses, usually seen in fragments, reenact moments from Ian’s life, conveying less historical fact than emotional impression. These reenactments, along with performance footage, talking head interviews with collaborators, critics and well-known fans, combine to create an inviting portrait of an artist more influential than you might think, and a picture whose appeal is not just limited to fans. Below, I spoke to Bar-Kar about securing Ian’s agreement to make the film, her path as a filmmaker, and the intent behind all of the film’s recreations. Janis Ian: Breaking Silence is currently in theatrical release from Greenwich Entertainment before screening later on PBS’s American Masters.
Filmmaker: Tell me about the beginnings of your interest in Janis Ian.
Bar-Kar: My very first exposure to her was when I was in high school. Someone had given me a record player, and then someone else had given me the album Between the Lines. I just had a handful of albums, honestly, because [I was] just sort of scrapping together my life at that time — most of what I wore and most of what I had were hand-me-downs. I remember listening to it and just feeling so free to feel whatever I wanted to feel — crying and feeling very seen and heard by the lyrics and the music. It just really struck me very deeply at that time.
And then about five or six years prior to my coming up with the idea of making a film about Janis, I really wanted to listen to vinyl. My husband gave me a record player, and I started to collect records again. I played Between the Lines for our daughters, and I shared the story about how important that album was to me in high school. When I finished Fandango At The Wall, I started to think about what to do next. There was a lot of talk about identity, and I was thinking, what if I made a film about someone with whom I closely identify, and within about two weeks, her name just popped into my mind. That’s how it started.
Filmmaker: Had you been following the arc of her career after Between the Lines and were interested in that, or was your filmmaking interest more inspired about connecting to your original love of that album?
Bar-Kar: It was truly somewhat of a mystical experience in that no, she was not very much on my mind, and she’s not someone that I’ve tracked [over the years]. It just that when I had that self-inquiry, she was still there, so clearly that identification I had so many years ago had stuck with me. I started to research her — of course, I knew the albums Stars and Aftertones — and listened to other music she’d done. I put together a collection of 80 to 100 of her songs that I thought were incredible, many of which I’d never heard before. And then I saw she’d written an incredible autobiography, Society’s Child. I read the book and thought that someone has to have done a film about her. And there wasn’t one. I couldn’t believe it. So I contacted her on the contact page on her website: “Hi, my name is Varda Bar-Kar, I’m a filmmaker and I’d love to make a film about you.”
Filmmaker: I read an interview with her where she talks about receiving that email from you. She said that her manager told her to ask you for a 20-minute sizzle reel. Tell me more about the process of convincing her to be in the film.
Bar-Kar: The first thing she wanted was to see some of my prior work. I sent her Fandango At The Wall, which is my first feature music documentary, and a short film I’d made called What Kind of Planet Are We On, an inventive, creative sci-fi short, which was actually part of a campaign to make same-sex marriage legal. I realized that she loved science fiction, and [I shared] Big Voice, which features a high-school choir director; her father had been a high school choir director. And then, of course, Fandango at the Wall is [about] Mexican folk music but does very much celebrate the [overall] folk music tradition. So, I think there were probably things in each of the films that struck her. We had quite an extensive conversation, and I think she also liked the fact that I practiced Buddhism. So, she said, “Let’s go for it.”
Filmmaker: And what about the sizzle reel?
Bar-Kar: She remembers this [request] more clearly than I do. Because I usually don’t have all the funds when I start a film, I always first create a short piece to demonstrate what it’s going to be like. And it’s fully realized – it’s not a demonstration. I put everything I can into it. We managed to raise enough funds to shoot towards the film but used that material to create an 18-minute piece that was the template for what the whole film became. It incorporated all the different elements you see in the film: It’s got the mood shots, the archival footage, and the contemporary footage. Once we locked in those elements, and the approach, we shared it with her, and she did like that piece. And then it was, okay, now we are going to have to create a film that fits with this level of density in the material. Quite early on, I brought in Brooke Wentz, very good friend of mine, and she serves both as the music supervisor and a producer on the film. She’s friends with Pierre Hauser, who invests in films and is a friend of mine as well. She told Pierre that I was doing a documentary about Janis Ian. He got very excited about it and decided to give us those initial funds to do that piece.
Filmmaker: You talk about the density of the material, and it is quite remarkable that there’s barely a second in this film that’s not visually covered in some meaningful way. You illustrate so many beats and moments with your recreation material that another film might have relayed solely through talking head interviews. Could you talk about the choice to use recreations as heavily as you did?
Bar-Kar: Well, it was partly due to the fact that I really wanted to create a sense of being in the present moment. We see present-day Janis at the beginning of the film, but then I wanted to take audiences back and have them go through the experience with her. The film spans 73 years, and I wanted it to be very much “in the present” of that time as it unfolded. I felt it would throw people off if we kept cutting back to her, so we elected, with the exception of the very beginning, not to see until the end of the film. And so that required a lot of visuals. Growing up she did not have the economic means to be filming Super 8 footage, and she did not have any documentaries done about her prior. So, there was only interview and performance footage of her, essentially. I don’t like recreations, honestly, but I thought, what if I just do them like fragments of memories, where I don’t try to fully recreate something but just kind of evoke it. That’s like the way my memory is — I just remember fragments of things. So that’s how we did it. Matthew Wilder, the DP, did a fabulous job creating that dream-like quality. We shot digital with variable frame rates and shutter speeds, and then we also shot a bunch of it, actually, on Super Eight film. When Janis was three years old, and you see her at the chicken farm with her parents, you know, there was no footage of that. And her father loved to play the piano. So, we found this amazingly old, perfect farmhouse in Altadena in Los Angeles. It had the porch, big old rooms, and it had a piano. We [cast] a little girl, brought in these amazing chickens, and we used [Janis’s] real-life photos to figure out the wardrobe. And then we covered the little girl running around with Super 8 and digital — I said [to Matthew], “Film it like you’re a family member just trying to catch her in this little moment.”
Another [shoot] that I think worked super well was when we found an apartment house in Koreatown in LA, which had to play for New York. Janis is with Claire [Bay], and they’re having to move in with her mother because they didn’t have the money to afford a place in New York at that point, even after she’d been really big. We found this amazing [apartment house], with the perfect staircase, and I felt like I was watching [Janis] arrive in New York, coming up the stairs. We did also film in New York, as well as L.A., but we had to recreate Nashville. There was a lot of land to cover.
Filmmaker: Tell me about your relationship with Janis’s label. How early were they on board with regards to the music licensing?
Bar-Kar: That was part of my thinking when I brought in Brooke. She had done music rights for my other films. There’s a lot of music in this film, and we worked with Brooke to budget for it ahead of time, knowing that everything is always more than what you imagine. There’s Bob Dylan and Billy Joel in there, a lot of Janis’s music, obviously, and original composed music too. I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t challenging, but we pulled it off.
Filmmaker: What about the some of the narrative challenges you faced in terms of deciding what sections of her life to focus more or less on? Did the structure evolve or change throughout the production and edit?
Bar-Kar: I would like to give a shout out to Ryan Larkin, our editor. He did a fantastic job working through a lot of this with me. I had a 35-page outline document going into it before we did any editing at all. Telling her story I looked at what I guess you’d call her tentpole musical pieces. It’s a three-act structure, essentially, with turning points. I really leaned on the biopic genre, which I like to do in my films. I think it’s fun when a documentary kind of fits like a scripted genre. So “Society’s Child” is the heart of the first act, and then Between the Lines, Stars and Aftertones are the heart of the second act. And then there’s the turning point, where everything falls apart. The third act builds to Breaking Silence, and then what comes of that? That’s how it’s structured.
Filmmaker: Were there music biopics that you looked to as references or inspirations?
Bar-Kar: I did look, but I couldn’t find one that fit what I was imagining because of the collage. The closest I saw to some of the approach we took was The Andy Warhol Diaries. They used a lot of elements woven together. And I love the Nina Simone documentary [What Happened, Miss Simone?] and the George Harrison documentary that Scorsese was involved with [George Harrison: Living in the Material World]. So, there are a bunch, but none of them had the approach I was imagining. I feel there’s something original about this because I couldn’t find [another doc] that’s like this one.
Filmmaker: As an old vinyl music listener I appreciated that each act centered around an album. Today, there’s streaming, people watching music clips on YouTube, and the album doesn’t have the same kind of primacy.
Bar-Kar: The biggest challenge was that Janis has led an incredibly interesting and varied life, and there are amazing experiences — musical and cultural — did not make it into the film. We actually shot a bunch of [those experiences], but we had to focus [the movie]. We decided that if we bring something up, but nothing comes of it, and nothing really led to it, it goes out. So that helped us figure out what to take out. Some of it is stuff I really love and is really important in Janis’s life, but it was [about] whatever serves the film. For example, when she was a girl, the family went on a picnic, and she went into nature and had this sense of connection with something much larger than herself. It was like a spiritual awakening. I had a similar experience as a young girl, and as it affected her, it affected me. She decided she believed in God after this experience. We did have that in the film, but it didn’t connect; it didn’t work with the story because of the way I decided to [organize] it around these songs. Another is that she was very influenced by and felt very passionate about her connection to Stella Adler. We did have a sequence involving Stella Adler, but once again, it just felt like an appendage.
Filmmaker: Was Janis training to be an actress?
Bar-Kar: She decided she could have greater stage presence, and she thought if she worked with Stella Adler she would have a better understanding of what it means to be a performer. [That work] did make her more comfortable on stage, and she became very close to Stella Adler. Stella became her mentor. We have a Stella Adler quote at the end of the film, so that was how I was able to get Stella in there, because Janis really wanted that.
Filmmaker: I noticed that you worked as a script supervisor for directors like Jim Jarmusch. How did that job prepare you for what you’re doing now?
Bar-Kar: I really started as a filmmaker — I mean, my aspiration was always to make my own films, and I took a very traditional route. I worked as a production assistant, a production manager and actually AD’d a scripted feature. I worked my way up, and script supervising was a good fit because I was able to learn so much. I worked with Carol Ballard, Jim Jarmusch and Wayne Wang, and then a series of incredibly talented commercial directors. Rocky Morton was a mentor of mine, and someone I worked with for 10 years. I was the kind of script supervisor who was involved beyond taking the notes, I always had ideas coming to me, and I would quietly whisper them to the director. But [the job] really prepared me. I had to memorize shots and how they would cut together, and I really had to pay attention to how things were shot to make sure they would cut. I’m very technical, and I love continuity, cameras, lenses, depth of field. So script supervising gave me more confidence in the cinematic language than I had coming out of art school. What are the dynamics of the set, and how much you can push to get what you want and what is possible?
Filmmaker: We’re in an interesting moment now when so many documentaries are not finding support, but some of the ones that are celebrity-driven, or music driven, and where the subjects have a very heavy degree of control. Often they are even the producer who have initiated the projects. Your film does feel, as you say, respectful, but it does feel like an artist’s film, a filmmaker’s film. Were there ever any tension points in terms of the cut? I read an interview where Janis said just asked for the right to point out factual mistakes.
Bar-Kar: We got lucky in the sense that she’s just very honest about everything in her life. I mean, she has nothing to hide, so we had total free reign. There were maybe three or four notes that having to do with accuracy, and that was it.
Filmmaker: Is there anything you’d like to add?
Bar-Kar: Just that [in a film like this] you walk that fine line between being truthful and honest — really revealing someone’s story — [and] maintaining a certain level of respect. As a documentary filmmaker, I think that’s a very kind of sacred thing, to simultaneously be honest and respectful when telling the story of someone’s life.
