INTERVIEW: New HBO doc looks at life of Jane Fonda
Photo: Jane Fonda is the subject of the new HBO documentary Jane Fonda in Five Acts. Photo courtesy of HBO / Provided by press rep with permission.
Jane Fonda in Five Acts, the new HBO documentary by director Susan Lacy, looks into the famous actor’s personal and professional life, highlighting the many twists and turns of a journey that has often played out in the public spotlight.
Lacy is no rookie when it comes to documentary film; she created the American Masters series for PBS and was first inspired to tell Fonda’s story after reading the actor’s memoir a few years ago. Fonda, of course, is a two-time Oscar winner who has made a number of classic films, including Klute, Julia, Coming Home and On Golden Pond. She continues to act, including this year’s Book’s Club.
“I’ve always been a fan of hers,” Lacy said in a recent phone interview. “I’ve always found her fascinating, but 17 years ago I read her book, her memoir, My Life So Far. And I became even more interested, and I felt that not only was she a wonderful actress and a beautiful woman — there’s a Hollywood family story in there, which as I discovered in the book was kind of mythic — but there was a fascinating gender journey to be told that I thought many, many, many women and a lot of men could relate to.”
Lacy said Fonda’s life, which includes many triumphs, setbacks and regrets, have a universality, and these elements struck her emotionally. So after reading the memoir, she set out to make a film. However, while still at American Masters, she was unable to fundraise enough money for the project because a lot of the movie stills and archival footage cost a lot of money.
“I couldn’t get the money together,” she said. “These films are very expensive. All that archive footage and Hollywood clearances, stills, nobody’s giving it to you for nothing. The only thing I got for nothing was her father’s own home movies. I couldn’t get it together.”
Lacy ran American Masters for nearly three decades and eventually made the move to HBO. Her new network liked the idea of a Fonda documentary, and it was an added incentive that the actor was already a cast member of The Newsroom.
“I thought they might be very receptive to the idea, and they were immediately receptive to the idea,” Lacy said. “They thought it was a great idea, so I was able to make it happen.”
After securing funding, Lacy set out to interview Fonda. Each interview lasted approximately two hours, and in total, the director had almost a day’s worth of footage to pull from.
“It was about 21 hours altogether of interviews with her over a period of time, as you can probably tell from the film because she’s in a different outfit each time,” Lacy said. “I actually like that. I didn’t feel the need to have any consistency in the way she looked because her changing looks and her wardrobe and her hair and everything is part of her fascination, I think. She has many different looks. I was always curious to see what she was going to look like each time I did an interview.”
It was then, after digesting all of the quotes and research, that Lacy began to see Fonda’s story playing out in five acts, hence the documentary’s title.
“I had to really absorb it, but the notion of acts was kind of embedded — it might have even been subconsciously embedded — from her own book,” Lacy said. “Jane didn’t see this film until I was finished. She didn’t know what I was doing, but she says in her book and she says in my film [that she] wanted to understand [her] first two acts. She saw it in 30-year segments, and she was 60 years old when she started to research her memoirs. So she figured she might live to 90, so she saw it in terms of 30-year increments. She said, I want to understand my first two acts in order to know how to live my third, so the notion of acts was in the back of my brain somewhere when I began to work on the film.”
When Lacy was making films for American Masters, she often encountered the so-called “third-act problem.” A person’s life was interesting in the first act (growing up and establishing oneself) and the second act (the act of creation), but the third act was often not as cinematically stirring. “The third act is often an act of decline or sadness or disappointment,” she said. “It’s not as vital.”
For Fonda, that was not the case.
“I thought, my God, the life she’s living right now is every bit as vital,” the director said. “She’s living a more vital life now, her fifth act. Jane today is the fully realized Jane, and the first four acts were about the influence of the men in her life, starting with her father.”
Fonda was open to the idea of the documentary, and Lacy does not hold back from covering the difficult, controversial aspects of the actor’s life, including her infamous trip during the Vietnam War.
“There’s no holding back,” Lacy said. “She feels sometimes watching it is painful. … First of all, I think there’s some things in there that are painful for her to be reminded of and to see, but also I think she feels quite narcissistic. She says, ‘Here I am talking about myself, and the world is falling apart.’ I said, ‘Don’t feel that way. Other people are not looking at it that way. You have many life lessons in this film that I think can be really helpful to people.'”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Jane Fonda in Five Acts is currently playing on HBO and in cinemas. Click here for more information.
