So Emotional
WHITNEY I Kevin Macdonald’s access-all-areas doc lifts the lid on the tragic songstress…
Iwas a bit dubious to be honest,” says Kevin Macdonald, talking about when he was first approached to make a documentary about pop sensation Whitney Houston. “I wasn’t a natural Whitney fan. What I knew about her was some of the pop songs which I liked. It was my generation. But I felt her reputation was weighed down with all the tabloid infamy.”
From America’s sweetheart, selling 200 million records, to a drug abuser who drowned in her own hotel bathtub in 2012, Houston’s “relentless slide” has already been luridly picked over. But Macdonald (Marley, Touching The Void) gradually became intrigued. “I wanted to figure out who this person was, why they ended up as they did, but also show the world that she should really be taken seriously.”
What really tipped him was a New Yorker article about Houston’s 1991 Super Bowl rendition of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. “This piece said this was the greatest single performance of the national anthem in American history,” says Macdonald. “It changed the meaning of the song. It made it into a song about freedom rather than a song about warfare.”
Tracing her life from the gospel choir to mega-stardom with hit movie The Bodyguard, Macdonald had the full cooperation of the Houston estate (unlike the recent Nick Broomfield-directed Whitney: Can I Be Me). Yet despite the access, it was no mean feat. “I’ve never experienced anything quite like this film,” he says. “In terms of the amount of lying [and] dissembling.
People really didn’t always want to tell you the truth.”
Frequently, Macdonald returned to the key players – including brothers Gary and Michael and sister-in-law Pat Houston. “In the world I’ve lived in before, the pre-Whitney world, that was quite unusual to interview anyone twice,” he says. “The result of that is you are actually getting through the protective layer to something a bit more human and truthful.”
Macdonald’s digging leads to some remarkable revelations, even if he gets short shrift from Houston’s ex-husband Bobby Brown. “[He] hasn’t really spoken about Whitney since she died,” he says. “Unfortunately, he couldn’t really go beyond his own self-protection.” The ‘My Prerogative’ singer was married to Houston from 1992 t0 2007, and has a considerable presence in the film via archive footage.
While Whitney has the potential to go down alongside Asif Kapadia’s Amy as one of the great music docs of the era, it’s “the hardest film I’ve made”, says Macdonald. “You go through phases of really disliking your subject and thinking, ‘Why am I making a film about this person?’ And then at the end, I fell in love with her. I felt like I finally understood her.”
ETA | 6 JULY / WHITNEY OPENS NEXT MONTH.