Paul Graham
Margaret Brown
Issue #26
The first-time director paints a vivid portrait of a man and a mystery
By Rebecca Flint-Marx
Published: December 1st, 2005 | 12:00am
Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt unfolds like a fever dream: a wash of hazy landscapes and faces captured in the frame of an old Super-8, underscored by the crackly sounds of two voices, one of which belongs to the film’s title subject. “I don’t envision a long life for myself,” Townes Van Zandt says. “I think my life will run out before my music does.” That these words are prophetic hardly bears mention. What Van Zandt — who died at the age of 52 in 1997 — couldn’t have predicted was that his death would mark the beginning of a new fascination with the life that he led.
Be Here to Love Me, directed by Margaret Brown, takes a long, probing look at the singer-songwriter who never hit it big even as he influenced a dizzying range of musicians, from Steve Earle and Lucinda Williams to Steve Shelley and the Cowboy Junkies. Brown’s film combines archival footage and recordings with reminiscences from friends, family, and associates that shed light on Van Zandt while preserving the air of quiet enigma that characterized both him and his music.
Four and a half years in the making, Be Here to Love Me is being released December 2, 2005. We spoke with the Austin-based Brown on the phone while she was in Seattle, where she was in the process of blowing her film up to 35mm.
When was the first time you heard Townes Van Zandt?
When I was growing up in Mobile, [Alabama], my dad, who’s a songwriter, had a studio. You’d walk through a room to get there, and all it was was records. My dad wasn’t a big Townes fan but a big blues and folk fan. So I heard [Van Zandt’s] music growing up, but I didn’t think it was that cool. Then when I was in my 20s, I had a housemate who one night played a Townes record, and “Waiting to Die” [one of Van Zandt’s most famous songs] resonated with me. I became pretty obsessed and bought everything on first-edition vinyl. That’s how it started.
You were able to get such relaxed, candid commentary from Van Zandt’s friends and family. Gus Clark, for example, goes on about him flirting with Clark’s wife and being a “kinky motherfucker.”
That was drinking with [Clark] shot for shot while doing the interview. You have to play the game. It was fun. Like when I interviewed Willie Nelson, we played chess and dominoes, and he invited me to go camping. He was real sweet.
For all of the interviews with musicians like Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Emmylou Harris, and Steve Earle, you manage to avoid the curse of the talking heads.
A lot of music films are about convincing you that that person is the best person: they’re all testimonials. So I had this rule: I would cut anytime someone said [Van Zandt] was the best songwriter in the world. I wanted the film to talk about his family, his life choices, and his songwriting. Mike Timmons [of the Cowboy Junkies] said this amazing thing about Townes floating off the earth at the end of his life. It was sort of a testimonial, and the last thing I cut out of the movie.
There’s also a lack of any paint-by-numbers chronology.
I think a lot of what makes things powerful is what you don’t say, or leave to the mind. I wanted the film to feel more like a collage or a journey; when you meet someone, you don’t start with birth and go to death. I wanted a gradual unfolding, and for it to have the feeling that you would feel listening to the music. I wanted to figure out a way to tell the story where you feel it as much as possible, and make choices about your own life while you watch it.
In addition to your own documentary, there are at least two other Townes projects that have been announced. Why do you think people are finally so interested in him?
Probably because everyone becomes more famous after they die. That’s really sad, because Townes had a really strong body of work, and is kind of cookie-cutter perfect for a story to be told about him. It’s like Steve Shelley said: ‘It’s a great secret — do you want to pass it on to your friend or not?” I think when you hear [his music] it’s so special, and it’s like he’s singing to you. There’s something in those songs I had to listen to over and over. They make you feel a certain way; you can’t name it.
Comments
Please login to be able to comment on this article.
more