Sam Jones established himself as one of the finest music documentarians we have with 2002’s “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco,” and he continued in that vein with “Lost Songs: The Basement Tapes Continued” in 2014 and, now, HBO Max’s highly lauded “Jason Isbell: Running With Our Eyes Closed.” Yet he doesn’t want to make music films his sole bread and butter — in part because of just how much he values the best ones. The director explained why on this episode of Variety’s “Doc Dreams” presented by National Geographic.
“I am so subject-drawn and driven, rather than genre-driven, so it’s possible I’ll never make another music documentary, or maybe I’ll make five more,” Jones says. “But my next documentary is a motorcycle documentary. I’ve had a lot of opportunities or done a lot of flirting with different music documentary ideas through the years, but they’re the hardest, because it’s the thing I love most, number one — not the films, but music. I love it so much that it’s very daunting to try to get them right, and they’re hard to do.”
The sheer proliferation of music docs in contemporary times would seem to negate Jones’ notion about just how difficult they are, but he’s working in a different realm than the vast majority of music films that are highly sanitized and controlled looks at artists whose managers keep a tight lock on just which “wart” their client is going to emphasize on screen. Jones and this movie’s subjects, Jason Isbell and his singer-songwriter wife, Amanda Shires, agreed that the director would have free reign about what he wanted to create out of what started as the documentation of Isbell’s “Reunions” album in 2019-20. But Jones had reason to wonder whether they would want to live up to that after he filmed what appeared to be cracks developing in their relationship during and immediately after the recording sessions. Fortunately, the boldness that both artists evidence in their respective songwriting and interviews translated to a sometimes uneasy forthrightness about what they were OK with putting on screen.
“Jason says it best. He says, ‘There’s two kinds of documentaries — the ones that the subject is comfortable with, and the good ones’,” Jones relays, approvingly.
“You know, because of all the stuff between him and his wife and their daughter, and me also being in a marriage” and understanding the issues involved, “I just expected when I showed them the film that there may have been a negotiation about some of that stuff.” Jones points to a scene near the end of the film where Shires, alone at home during the pandemic, turns on the camera and reads from her smartphone a bracingly honest letter that she wrote to her husband when their marriage hit a rough spot. “She read all that to me before telling Jason she was gonna do it. So when I sent them the film and they didn’t have anything they wanted to take out, that’s when my respect for them as artists really was at its highest.”
Because of Isbell’s and Shires’ candor, as much as his own endeavorings, he thinks “Running With Our Eyes Closed” is able to hark back to an earlier, less tightly controlled era.
“I get a little nostalgic for some of these earlier music documentaries that I grew up on, whether it’s ‘Don’t Look Back’ or ‘Gimme Shelter,’ where I think people were less aware and it was more of a novelty to have a camera around. Now, it’s funny — you make a documentary and you realize people are making documentaries all day long on their phones, and they’re so aware of how they are on camera. It was so refreshing with Amanda that she has this ability to just sort of be in the moment without really thinking about, ‘How will this affect me? How will this make me come off? Will people like me?’ I think she just is herself in any situation. And I think that that bravery sort of gave Jason permission to also be that way in those joint interviews. I do think this documentary is unique in our age of people being very aware of their presence on camera; these two are being very real in a way that is refreshing and authentic.”
It’s Isbell’s name in the title; when the film goes from the vérité of the present to exploring backstories, those narrative discursions are about his past, as a child of divorce, a member of the band Drive-by Truckers in his youthful days and eventually a recovering alcoholic. But in the movie, the marriage is ultimately the window to his soul… or vice versa. “It became clear early on that, even though we were telling Jason’s story, the most interesting thing to do was to do it through the lens of their relationship and their marriage. It became really clear when I started cutting the film that their story was the stepping off point for all of the forays into Jason’s past.
“They’re both open in very different ways,” Jones continues. “Jason obviously agreed to the parameters of this, which was, ‘Hey, I’m gonna pull you aside before you get to go play guitar,’ or, ‘On day three in the studio, I need you for an hour before you start,’ those kinds of things. And he was willing to honor his obligations on all that stuff. But I think Jason considers and is careful and measured in his responses about everything in life. Whereas I feel like Amanda was just naturally open to the spirit of making a documentary and really giving up control, whereas with Jason, it was a day-to-day, ‘OK, I’ve said I’ll do this and I’ll do it.’ Amandayou’d have to ask her, obviously. But I think she liked the artistic experiment of it all, and so she was very open, and had fun with it as well. You know, we left that part in the film where she says, ‘Oh, he’s just lying to you’” — as Isbell is sitting next to her. “And I think that that’s one of the things that makes this film special is that we’re making a film about Jason as an artist, but we’re also making a film about a marriage. And to have two different point of views, it makes it really complex and humorous and intimate.”
Fortunately, the recording sessions for “Reunions” were well wrapped up by the time the pandemic hit in early 2020, but Jones wasn’t nearly done with filming. After he shot an intimate performance with the two at L.A.’s Walt Disney Concert Hall at the beginning of that year, the world shut down. And Jones ended up sending high-def cameras for the two to set up themselves as they cloistered themselves at their home outside of Nashville. He admits to pandemic “panic” as he had to give up some control over how things got shot, directing remotely. But the silver lining of it was that the couple shot themselves individually and together during a period of personal rapprochement as they quarantined. And he’s not sure Shires ever would have read that letter if she’d had a director there asking her to, or that the couple would have sat down outside on a swinging chair to discuss where their relationship was at if they’d been cajoled into it.
Still, Jones remembers the day she read that letter on-camera, hoping it wasn’t a whim she’d want to take back. “I was here in Los Angeles, and I did send our Nashville PA to their house almost immediately after I hung up the phone to pick up the card from the camera. I thought, ‘I’m not gonna wait around until they have a discussion about whether they wanna send that particular card’,” he laughs. “But, as it turns out, they were, they were much more brave than even I gave them credit for, even though I knew they were brave. And for Amanda to share that, I think, was probably in the end inspiring to Jason, because it’s like, ‘Oh, OK, well, if if it scares us, then it’s the right thing to do.’”
Jones says that only in the editing room did he fully realize the tension that existed in the recording studio. He was running one of the cameras, and making sure there was full coverage of everything often took priority over paying attention to small, telling bits of dialogue that later seemed important — like a moment when Isbell quietly mentions to producer Dave Cobb that he spent the night at a hotel instead of at home, which no one asks any more about at the time. “When Jason said ‘I had a rough night’ in the studio, no one remembered that until it showed up in the edit room. It’s kind of like a little forensic science to go back through your footage and go, ‘Oh, wait, now that we know what happened, let’s go find those moments.’ Even like the little thing about the violin” — Isbell remarks that Shires’ fiddle sounds too loud, which has reverberations to come — “you could feel tension, enough that we took a camera shot and went down to the violin and the fact that Amanda wasn’t playing it the second time — but you don’t know the significance of it” at the time.
“That’s one reason it’s so great to have an editor that wasn’t there every day, because they’re judging just what’s on screen, and they’re not able to weigh that against the Amanda and Jason they know,” Jones says. “So in the case of the subtlety of Jason and Amanda’s fighting, I questioned often whether the audience was gonna pick up on it. And it was our editor, Erin Nordstrom, who assured me that she was picking up on it. And so she was sort of the first, best audience, because she didn’t have any more context other than what we had already shot.” But ultimately he had to trust the audience to catch these things without it being underlined. “This film is honest. It doesn’t cheat any of that stuff. What I really am proud of is that we didn’t have to manufacture any drama and we trusted the audience would pick up on the subtle stuff.”
There’s one moment in the film that’s really subtle: when Isbell and Shires are sharing the stage at an early 2020 acoustic performance at Walt Disney Hall, and mid-song, unseen by most or all of the live audience, she… winks at him. Some of the film’s viewers won’t think much about it, but for others, it will speak heartwarming volumes.
“That’s my favorite moment in the film,” Jones says, grateful that someone else noticed it. “When we found it, it immediately encapsulated everything. It’s like they know they’re destined to be together, and even when they’re at their worst and you know — like Jason says, thinking the whole thing is gonna fall apart — that wink by Amanda, I think, says, ‘I’m still here and it’s still you and I.’ And I happen to know that during the Disney concert they were not in a good place. And yet I think that (represents) what Jason is talking about: ‘We’re not connecting right now. But I’m on the other side of the bridge, and I don’t know how to get across to you, but I’ll just wave at you from this side.’ I think that wink is sort of the personification of that idea. I love that moment. And I love, in general, concert films that can do that — even though this isn’t a concert film, and this is our one concert moment of the whole thing. I love when you can expand on the experience with cameras and you realize there’s a whole different world going on, on stage, than what’s happening for the audience.”
Making the picks about what music to include was a challenge for Jones, as an Isbell super-fan. The most obvious choices were to pick songs that had an analog connection to real-life incidents in the singer’s life, like using the song “Dreamsicle,” which describes the tension leading up to his parents’ divorce, as a lead-in to that biographical flashback. But he also wanted to sell an audience that might be learning about Isbell for the first time on his music.
“Obviously there’s a lot of ‘Reunions’ in there because that’s the album we were filming,” says Jones, “but I did want to highlight some of his other music that was very autobiographical, like ‘Children of Children’ and ‘Cover Me Up’ and ‘Traveling Alone.’ Also, when you love an artist and you feel like they should have a wider audience, it’s on me to make those decisions. It’s like when you make a playlist for somebody and you’re like, ‘Well, you’ve never heard of the Replacements? OK, I’ll make you a playlist.’ Now you have this little responsibility to take something that you love and you want to pass it on, and you want to steer people in the right direction.”
One small side effect of the acclaim for “Running With Our Eyes Closed” is that audiences will want to go back and rediscover, or see for the first time, his Wilco film from 2002, “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart”— which Isbell has said he and the members of Drive-by Truckers used to watch on their tour bus all the time in the 2000s.
“With all of the great films that have been made about music, I just kind of can’t believe that that one still gets talked about,” Jones says. “And funny enough, I just bought it back from the distributor, so I now own it, 100% percent, and want to find a permanent home for it. Because one thing I think we did get right in that movie is the band dynamics, and how hard and weird and specific that is to that genre. What I like about what we are able to accidentally do is, because of the circumstances between Jeff (Tweedy) and Jay (Bennett), we were able to document what it really feels like to be in the studio, feeling very strongly about your creative decisions and having to learn how to make compromises. You know, those guys were fairly young back then. And so watching Wilco try to learn how to navigate all that, I think, connected with people.”
Watch the full conversation above.
