Quincy Jones has been one of the hardest working people in show business over the past seven decades. Jones is an accomplished musician, film and music production mogul, film and music composer, humanitarian, and loving family man, among other things. The music icon seemingly never stops working. His rags to riches story, facing tremendous adversity growing up and throughout his career, make his career all the more meaningful and impressive.
READ MORE: Quincy Jones On Embracing Change And Still Giving 150 Percent [Interview]
Jones’ daughter, actor, writer, producer, and director Rashida Jones, and musician and filmmaker Alan Hicks (“Keep on Keepin’ On“) recently teamed up to write and direct the quintessential documentary about the life of the entertainment mogul. Distributed by Netflix, “Quincy” is an informative, engaging, and timely feature that focuses on the legend’s past achievements, struggles, current endeavors, and captures the generosity of his spirit.
While promoting “Quincy,” I had an opportunity to sit down with Jones and Hicks about the tremendous effort and time put into making the film, the process of sorting through the archival footage, autodidactic filmmaking, Quincy’s influence, what’s next, and more.
Did you learn anything new about your father in the making of this documentary?
Rashida Jones: I don’t know if I learned anything new, but I certainly saw and heard a lot of new things. There was tons of stuff that I don’t think he’s even ever seen that was like buried away in this off-campus vault [laughter]. Not at his house. There was tons of footage there that I’d never seen before.
Is this where you sourced all of the archival footage?
Al Hicks: Yeah. It’s about 2000 hours of archival footage in total. And we shot 800 hours of footage with him around the world. So, it was a massive undertaking. It was a treasure trove of amazing things. In the vault is where the 16 mil film, the 8-millimeter film was, among the audio. But a lot of the stuff that got used in the film was from the vault. In every era, there was just somebody [who] had sent him some footage of — him on TV with Duke Ellington — that’s nowhere else. And all of a sudden, there it is. There’s Quincy with Duke on stage. That’s the only place you could find it.
Did you ever consider turning “Quincy” a docu-series in the process of making it?
Rashida Jones: Yes. But I think I think Al and I are both such film nuts, and as much as I love watching doc series, I really, really do, there is just something that happens to you when you’re immersed in somebody’s world for two hours. And the time that you get after to kind of think about it also return to it; there’s a few series in my life that I’ve returned to. Like “The Sopranos,” or “The Wire,” or “Seinfeld.” But I think that the impact, like the kind of per minute punch of a movie, and to try to make a definitive movie about him, is really what we wanted to do, absolutely.
In going through that footage, what did you want to focus and zero in on in telling Quincy’s story with this documentary?
Rashida Jones: Thematically, there’s so many things we wanted to get across. Obviously, his work ethic. His compulsion to be decategorized when he succeeded in one area, in music, or culture, or whatever, he would just push through and make a decision to go a different direction that had never been gone in by a young black man. So, kind of that compulsion, that need, that energy, that perseverance, and that passion. But then, especially with the archival footage, we wanted things that felt so quintessentially that era, whether it was the audio tracks or the footage that we found. So, because it spanned seven decades, we wanted to make sure that the flavor of that decade was really communicated with the visuals and the audio.
Al Hicks: You can’t predict any of that stuff, really. We knew the major points in his life. But at a certain point, the material just started speaking to us and informing us where to go and where the parallels were. And having things from the present informing the past, and vice versa – that’s something you can’t plan. And you kind of just put it out there to let the material lead us, I guess.