Getting to the soul of Whitney Houston
Started as a project to preserve the memory of the late singer’s talent, Kevin Macdonald’s film ended up revealing a shocking tale of abuse, writes .
When acclaimed filmmaker Kevin Macdonald was asked to helm a documentary on Whitney Houston, he was intrigued at the prospect of discovering more about the legendary singer.
He couldn’t have anticipated then the shocking family secrets that had never been revealed, one of which has made headlines all over the world.
In the film it is alleged by Whitney’s brother and her assistant and closest confidante, Mary Jones, that she and her sibling were molested as young children by their cousin, the late Dee Dee Warwick, a singer and sister of soul star Dionne.
The revelations came late, towards the end of a lengthy and challenging production for the Scottish filmmaker.
“That took a long time to get to. I felt that there was something like that in the story from quite early on, I sensed it,” says Macdonald.
I suspected it, I suspected it from the way Whitney was in front of the camera, her discomfort with herself, it seemed, I felt something traumatic has happened to this person. She feels like someone who’s suffered a trauma.
Her brother Gary was the first to reference the abuse, with Mary Jones, who was very close to Whitney and the last person to see her alive, confirming the singer had told her of the abuse and her subsequent turmoil.
“She didn’t want to talk about it until the family talked about it,” says Macdonald. “The family revealed it and she said: ‘Ok I now want to talk about this’.
"And how she felt it affected Whitney and that fact that Whitney felt so shamed about it, that she didn’t want to talk about it to her mother.”
Macdonald, whose films include the iconic mountaineering docudrama Touching the Void and One Day in September, the Oscar-winning documentary about the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich 1972 Olympics, has managed quite a feat in this powerful film.
He’s succeeded in talking to family and those who knew the tragic singer best without compromising creative control. It didn’t happen overnight, he says.
“The most controversial thing was talking about the abuse she suffered, which I only really found out about very late on. But there were other things that they resisted very fiercely as well.
"One of which was understanding that Whitney’s mother (soul legend Cissy Houston) had an affair with a preacher at a local church and this had led to the break-up of the family. The family was the place that Whitney found refuge because she had been bullied so much at school.
"The family and the church. But her mother had an affair with the pastor. She always obsessed about the divorce of her parents. Even into her forties she’d cry about it, about the fact that her parents had split up.
Right from the outset I said to them: ‘Look the only way this works for me is if I can have the final cut, if I can have creative control over it. I’m happy to show some cuts along the way, get your comments, but I might not take them on board’.
“They went along with that because in a way there was obviously self interest for them in allowing a filmmaker who had some credibility to do it. Because then the film would be taken seriously, it wouldn’t be seen as a paste job. Which wouldn’t have helped Whitney.
"Their agenda was they wanted people to see Whitney as the great artist that she was. To feel more compassion for her personally. Rather than condemning her and feeling that she was this self-destructive addict, there was nothing else to her.
“That doesn’t mean that it was easy to persuade them to actually open up. I interviewed them two or three, four times, some of them. They’re stuck in this period, they’re psychologically stuck.
"One of the things that I’ve never experienced before is that the film has been an incredible psychological release for them, and although they resisted and were a bit angry about certain things being in the film, now they feel: ‘God we should have talked about this a long time ago’.
"I think its given them permission to escape their mental prison. Both the brothers said to me individually: ‘This is the therapy session we never had’.”
Macdonald certainly succeeds in bringing home how iconic a star Houston became through the sheer power and range of her voice, and the impact her music had culturally in America and around the world. He feels that her death from drowning in a bathtub while under the influence of drugs was a tragic loss.
“It is like a classical tragedy in some ways, in that the most innocent, beautiful, talented person, for whom everything goes so wrong, that it almost feels mythic.”
Filmmaker Nick Broomfield’s well-received film about the singer was released last year, but Macdonald felt it wouldn’t impact on his film.
“We made the decision, rightly or wrongly, that whatever else was being done, and there were many many things being made about Whitney, that nobody else was going to have the access to these people, to the footage, to the music that we were going to have.
"So I didn’t let it concern me because I thought if I can make a good film it’s a good film.”
Some of the testiest scenes in the film involve Macdonald’s efforts to persuade the star’s ex-husband, Bobby Brown, to discuss her drug use.
“When he came, it was clear that he had a limit of what he’d talk about and what he won’t. So in pushing him not even that hard you’ve got this wall coming down. And you get such a sense of his denial, the fact that he’s just not ready to talk about this stuff.
"One of the things I think the film shows is he’s not the bad guy. I mean, he’s not blameless in her downfall, but he isn’t the one who took this innocent sweet flower and corrupted her.”
A committed documentary maker, Macdonald found following the success of Touching the Void an opportunity to make features such as The Last King of Scotland, starring Forest Whitaker as dictator Idi Amin, and the drama How I Live Now with our own Saoirse Ronan.
“It was Touching the Void that was actually a popular success. It was a story that affected people very deeply. At that time it was the rare thing, because people hadn’t had documentaries at the cinema much. Then people were saying: ‘Do you want to do a fiction film?’
“It happened so accidentally that I got into fiction. I used to think before that that documentaries were the purer art form. I love stories.
“Last King of Scotland did well and suddenly I found myself with this kind of twin career. I’ve tried to keep that going. And obviously not everything you do is going to be successful.
"It’s hard not to be pigeonholed, but that’s what keeps me creatively going.”
