2023 Woodstock Film Festival: A Conversation With the Filmmakers of “Joan Baez I Am A Noise”

To celebrate the 24th Annual Woodstock Film Festival, INSIDE+OUT is pleased to present a series of interviews with filmmakers showcasing their films in this year’s festival. Today we catch up with the filmmakers of Joan Baez I Am A Noise – Karen O’Connor, Miri Navasky and Maeve O’Boyle.

Facing the end of a 60-year musical career, legendary singer and activist Joan Baez takes an honest look back and a deep look inward as she tries to make sense of her large history-making life and reveals personal struggles she’s kept private, until now.

Neither a conventional biopic nor a traditional concert film, Joan Baez I Am A Noise is a raw and intimate portrait of the legendary folk singer and activist that shifts back and forth through time as it follows Joan on her final tour and delves into her extraordinary archive, including newly discovered home movies, diaries, artwork, therapy tapes, and audio recordings. Baez is remarkably revealing about her life on and off stage – from her lifelong emotional struggles to her civil rights work with MLK and a heartbreaking romance with a young Bob Dylan. A searingly honest look at a living legend, this film is a compelling and deeply personal exploration of an iconic artist who has never told the full truth of her life, as she experienced it, until now.

 

INSIDE+OUT: Tell us about your latest film, which will be shown at this year’s festival.

Karen O’Connor + Maeve O’Boyle + Miri Navasky: We’re absolutely thrilled to be showing our film Joan Baez | I Am A Noise at the Woodstock Film Festival. The film changed a lot over time. When we first started out, we were planning to make a virtual film following Joan Baez on her final tour. We were going to focus on her facing the end of a 60-year career and dealing with the demands of touring and performing as an 80-year-old woman. But then we discovered her amazing archive in a storage locker, and the entire film changed. So what we’ve ended up with is neither a conventional biopic nor a concert film. It’s more of a visual memoir, but that doesn’t fully describe it either. Joan, we learned, wanted to go into aspects of her life that she’d never discussed publicly before. Karen had been friends with Joan for over 30 years, so we really had her trust from the get-go, which allowed for a special kind of film. She really let down her guard. While we knew we were making a sort of “celebrity” documentary, we also wanted to make an unusually intimate, raw, and real film that would give viewers a window into her inner life. Her archive – the artwork, diaries, photographs, therapy tapes and audiotaped letters that she sent home – helped us capture what she had experienced in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s in real-time – and bring her past to life. Although this film had a strong biographical element to it, we also wanted to create an immersive experience, something we have tried to do in all of our films.

What inspired you to choose a career in the film business, and what was your journey?

Miri: Well, I actually kind of fell into a career in film. I’d been planning to go to grad school for history when, needing money, I got a job as a secretary at Frontline on WGBH Public Radio Station in Boston. I happened to sit right outside the office of an overworked and very generous producer (thank you, June Cross!), who started giving me substantive things to do. As it turned out, I was pretty terrible at answering phones (many people got disconnected), but I was pretty good at research. I absolutely loved that I had the freedom to dive deep into many different subjects; it was like self-made grad school (but with no commitments!).

Maeve: I got an internship at NY’s Public Broadcasting station, WNET. I realized during that time that I was particularly interested in editing documentary films. I felt there was freedom but also a huge challenge in structuring a story out of hundreds of hours of footage. That excited me, so that became my focus. I became interested in being in the field and directing more recently, and only once I felt I understood storytelling on a deeper level.

Karen: I began my career in filmmaking as a production intern at a small PBS station and realized right away that it was a really good fit. Over time, I moved up to producing/directing and loved learning about people’s stories and digging deep into a wide range of issues. Like Miri and Maeve, I was always drawn to documentaries, especially films that focused on social issues, and the three of us have been incredibly lucky in our now very long careers to make films that have had real meaning to each of us.

What was your most rewarding or the most challenging project to date?

Miri + Maeve + Karen: We think it’s fair to say that for all of us, this film was the most challenging. For one thing, there were three directors with different ideas, which ultimately made the film better but also brought its own challenges along the way. And none of us had done any kind of biography before – it’s just a different beast! But it wasn’t just a biography; there was also the contemporary strand – the concert film – and the psychological strand. Three films in one! Meanwhile, there was the pandemic at the beginning of our edit. Add to that, the challenge of following her on her last tour, which was filled with stress – and exhaustion. (How anyone does that at 80 is beyond us!). Plus, there was a HUGE archive of a woman who was famous from the age of eighteen. We had an overabundance of rich, fascinating material. But that also meant there were a million ways to go with the story, so it was an enormous challenge to parse through the material (we had no real staff, so it was the three of us doing the parsing!) and then figure out the narrative line. We all still mourn things we had to cut out. Given our struggles, just finishing the film felt like an accomplishment. But the challenges made completing the film all the more rewarding.

What is one question you’re constantly asked, or what’s the biggest misconception about what you do?

Miri + Maeve + Karen: Hmm… well, there are a million misconceptions. But one of the biggest that we’ve all encountered is that people often assume you started out with the film you’ve ended up with, as if what they see on screen had been out there, waiting to be captured. The truth is you may go in with one vision, but that vision changes drastically as you film and edit. Often, the narrative line – and even the very nature of the film – shifts organically during the process, which can be trying, but that’s part of the magic of filmmaking. The best films are products of discovery and experimentation. You have to be flexible, stay open and give the film space to be the film it wants to be.

Can you put your finger on what makes a great Director and who inspires you?

Miri + Maeve + Karen: The directors who inspire us create a sense of intimacy, bringing viewers into the lives – especially the inner lives – of people in their films. There’s not one way to do this. Possibly, directors do the work of building trust with their subjects. Perhaps they ask the right questions at the right time. Maybe they use skillful editing. Probably all these things are needed. In any case, creating a sense of intimacy is hard. Well-crafted, technically sound films with strong narratives are common. Much rarer are those that enable viewers to really get to know and understand the people on screen (or to feel as though they do.)

On a practical note, one thing that seems key in documentary film is flexibility – learning how to let go and allow for collaboration with the talent around you. Lean on people! Use the best of everybody! It is the beauty of filmmaking, a completely collaborative art form. Ideally, try not to get stuck in preconceived ideas and never rule anything out before giving it some thought. And once you’re in the early rough cut stage, it’s important to be humble and open to feedback. Consider all negative comments without taking them too personally, as feedback often brings you to a better place in the end.

What are you working on now that you’re excited about?

Miri + Maeve + Karen: One thing we’re all working on right now is promoting this film. Ha! In all seriousness, it’s the hazard of independent filmmaking. It never seems to end! We’re also using this time to think about many potential projects (a super special time for directors – when there is space to think and anything is possible). Karen and Miri, who run Mead Street Films, are playing around with a lot of different ideas, including revisiting a film we did nearly ten years ago about transgender kids. We want to go back and take a look at where these kids are now. Maeve has put her editing cap back on and is currently at work editing a film called The Animated Mind of Oliver Sacks.

If you could have one superpower, what would it be?

Miri + Maeve + Karen: Well, beyond the standard flying, time-travel and mind-reading fantasies, we would all like to be able to re-edit our films with our minds -after they’re locked!

 

More About the Filmmakers

Karen O’Connor is an award-winning filmmaker. Her films—produced, written, and directed with Miri Navasky—include The Killer at Thurston High, an investigation of a school shooting that won a Banff Award; The Suicide Plan, an Emmy-nominated film that delves into the hidden world of assisted suicide; the Emmy-nominated The New Asylums, a portrait of mentally ill prisoners that won the Robert F. Kennedy Grand Prize Journalism Award; the Emmy award-winning The Undertaking, an exploration of mortality and grief told through the perspective of renowned poet-undertaker Thomas Lynch; and the Emmy-nominated Growing Up Trans, a personal exploration of the struggles and choices facing transgender children, and their parents, which was nominated for an Emmy, shortlisted for a Peabody Award, and won a DuPont Columbia Award.

Miri Navasky is an award-winning filmmaker who co-founded Mead Street Films with Karen O’Connor more than two decades ago. Her films include The Killer at Thurston High, an investigation of a school shooting that won a Banff Award; the Emmy-nominated The New Asylums, a portrait of mentally ill prisoners that won the Robert F. Kennedy Grand Prize Journalism Award; The Undertaking, an Emmy award-winning film that follows poet-undertaker Thomas Lynch as he explores mortality and grief in a small Michigan town; The Suicide Plan, an Emmy-nominated film that delves into the hidden world of assisted suicide; and Growing Up Trans, an intimate exploration of the struggles and choices facing transgender children and their parents that was nominated for an Emmy, shortlisted for a Peabody, and won a DuPont Columbia Award.

Maeve O’Boyle is an Emmy-award winning filmmaker. She edited The Education of Mohammad Hussein (HBO), which was shortlisted for an Academy Award and co-produced and edited Firestone and Warlord (PBS), winner of an Emmy and an IRE Award in 2014. Together with Karen O’Connor and Miri Navasky, Maeve also edited and co-produced Growing Up Trans (PBS) which won a DuPont Columbia Award. She also co-wrote and edited 112 Weddings for Doug Block, which premiered at Full Frame, Hot Docs, and Sheffield Doc/Fest and aired on HBO and BBC Storyville; and Do I Sound Gay? for David Thorpe, which premiered at Toronto International Film Festival and was the runner-up there for the People’s Choice Award. Maeve’s other work includes Left of the Dial (HBO), Heat (PBS), Carrier (PBS), and The Kids Grow Up (HBO), which premiered at International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam and Full Frame and won a special Jury prize at AFI Docs. In 2020, she directed, produced, and edited The 8th, which was critically acclaimed in the UK and Ireland and nominated for an IFTA for Best Documentary. She is currently editing the feature documentary The Animated Mind of Oliver Sacks.

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About the Woodstock Film Festival
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Founded in 2000, the Woodstock Film Festival (WFF) is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) organization that nurtures and supports emerging and established filmmakers, sharing their creative voices through an annual festival and year-round programming to promote culture, diversity, community, educational opportunities and economic growth.

WFF provides innovative mentoring and inspired educational programs benefitting filmmakers, students and diverse audiences while serving as a powerful cultural and economic engine for New York’s Hudson Valley and beyond. Such efforts have consistently resulted in the festival being hailed as one of the top regional film festivals worldwide. The Woodstock Film Festival is an Oscar®-qualifying festival in the short film categories – Live Action Short Film, Animated Short Film, and Documentary Short Film.

Now in its 24th year, 2023 promises to as exciting as ever! 2023 lineup and Tickets HERE.
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