Director Brett Morgen Talks Making Working With Jane Goodall [Interview]

The story of Jane Goodall is well-known. The world’s foremost expert on chimpanzees, over the course of a 55-year study of the social and familial interactions of the primates in Gombe, Goodall’s fieldwork has become groundbreaking in making us better understand the connections of humans to primates.  
Using a treasure trove of unseen footage, courtesy of National Geographic, director Brett Morgen (“The Kid Stays in the Picture,” “Montage of Heck“) gives us his very best movie with “Jane.” He tells the story of Goodall’s early work in Gombe, which focuses on her groundbreaking approach to studying chimpanzees. However, as it goes along, the film becomes so much more than that. Her relationship with cameraman and husband Hugo van Lawick becomes central to showing us a woman finding her own unique voice in the vast openness of the isolated world in which she resides.
Aided by a uniquely touching score courtesy of Philip Glass, Morgen has done the impossible, he’s made us care about a story we thought we already knew, but which had so much more ground to cover. With more than 140 hours of footage available at his disposal, the director takes us on a unique and unforgettable journey through the eyes of one of the most important women of our time.
We spoke to Morgen about the editing process, the film’s unique POV and, most important of all, Jane.

“Jane” touches on so many various storylines and topics. What is this movie about to you?
At first we thought it was a love story before Hugo and Jane. We then realized that the movie was really about a woman and her work and a man and his work. We’ve seen films where people are falling in love in first-person documentaries. Jane is so unique because it begins in a traditional manner and morphs into the fourth wall being penetrated and then you see Jane and Hugo falling in love in front of the camera. When you see Hugo introduced with his lens, there’s the sense that the camera loves Jane. This is very much a movie built on love.

There’s a shift in point of views that felt so risky but so rewarding at the same time. I imagine it must have been quite stressful for you to figure how to shift the POV without hampering the audience’s attention too much.
That is really funny because I don’t think I’ve been asked that before in an interview, so you’re a fucking genius [laughs]. The greatest anxiety I had in making this film had to do with how we would handle the POV shift. I obsessed over that. We had to make the turn. I kept thinking the audience is going to stand and say, “Liar, you cheated us.” What happened was my editor and I spent the first eight months of this film cutting, and recutting over and over the first 12 minutes of this film in order to enable us to make that transition. What was so challenging is we had to construct that sequence in a matter that did not allow the audience time to think too much about who is filming in those moments. What we found is that having Jane being photographed with a telephoto lens, so you don’t feel the presence of a camera presence, we were able to create that division so that when Hugo arrives we could have that subjective POV.

I love how you used and edited the footage to just bring us back to that place and time in Gombe.
Thank you. The challenge with “Jane” was taking footage that was meant for a very different type of documentary, much more formal documentary — I actually just had an email exchange with Alex Gibney about the aspect ratio. How could we take that footage and tell a story that would resonate with audiences today?

And this was hours and hours of footage.
140 hours. That sequence you were alluding to, Hugo falling in love. That always gets me emotionally. Even last night after the NYFF screening we were saying how serene she was, I also noticed how her nose looked exactly the same as it did in 1960. She’s aged so beautifully inside and out. Jane is such a beautiful human being. It really just emanates.

One thing I love about your movies is how brilliantly edited they are. How different was this to your other works?
The rhythm was very different with “Jane.” In “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” there’s so much DNA related in how to make a specific cut. In “The Kid Stays in the Picture” there are no dissolves until the last reel. In “Montage of Heck” we were trying to find a style to invite you into Kurt’s inner thoughts. With “Jane” it’s about observing, watching, listening more than anything else and so we kind of needed it to have more lyrical, meditative, Malick-esque component to it. We sort of allowed her voice to act as our muse and to act as the the rhythm of our film. ‘Montage’ was the first film where I shot interviews. As a filmmaker, we should use every grain available to us to tell our story. Color and sound become an emotional tool. The idea of the talking head is you set up the camera and the shots stay the same, the lighting stays the same. In ‘Montage’ I wanted the lighting and composition to be respectable to the emotions the subject is embracing at that very moment, so you have to know where the subject is going emotionally as well to do that. By already having assembled [“Jane”] I had a better sense of what I was looking for in the interview with Jane, I didn’t want it to be a talking head interview cliche as well.

How was your relationship with Jane, how often did you speak to her? Was she open at first or did you have to make her open up a little?
Jane and I both have the same approach to making this film, which was none of us had any interest [laughs]. We had that in common. When I was asked to make a film about Jane, I was like, “Haven’t so many films already been made about Jane?” When National Geographic approached her, she had the same reaction — “What is there left to say?” The answer is plenty, I believe, and the fact of the matter is that the film hadn’t been made. We actually appreciate the way our lives came together for this opportunity.

When making the film I didn’t want her to have much to do with it. I didn’t want her to do too much because I had all the material needed already, all her writing, I had 12 books to read to base the script on. When Jane was asked to be interviewed she thought we could all just do it in three hours. We spent five days before the interview trying to line up the shots, and I think Jane realized that we were trying something a little more than just the usual documentary. The first question I asked her was, “Jane, are you tired of telling your story?” then she looked at me and answered, “Depends on who is asking the question” [laughs]. That is kind of where we started and that was the challenge. She kind of made me work for it. I did have a secret weapon though. I already cut the film, it was on my laptop, and around the time we started talking about Hugo I told her, “Jane, I just want to show you something we put together from the film,” and I showed her the sequence of her and Hugo falling in love, because I wanted to kind of bring her back to that space. It was quite effective and I think by the end of our four days of filming, there was a lot of mutual respect.

When Jane saw the film for the first time, she wrote me the most beautiful, heartfelt letter in which she said that after the film she felt as close as she’d ever felt before in being back in Gombe, in the sixty years since, and she couldn’t believe that we could achieve with that footage today to bring her back to that time. I wasn’t really a Jane Goodall fan before I made the film, I didn’t know much about her, but I think that’s what makes the movie so great: she’s spared the whole mythology that comes with her persona and it goes far deeper into who she is. What I found was that she was so even-handed, so honest, so serene. There’s an openness that is so unique. The journey is usually the best part of filmmaking but with Jane you can’t help but be touched by her service and how this woman made every moment count.