Stir Q&A: Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President director Mary Wharton talks elections and music
Her documentary captures a kinder, gentler era of American politics, while scoring interviews not only with the former POTUS but Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, and many more.
President Jimmy Carter hangs with Willie Nelson in Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President.
Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President screens October 23 to 29 at Vancity Theatre at VIFF Centre
FOR A BIT OF respite from the bitter debates and fake news circulating in the run-up to the American election, tune in to a kinder, gentler era. Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President traces the former POTUS’s little-known love of music, and the way he used it to connect with voters.
Director Mary Wharton combines intimate interviews with the nonagenarian Carter, often spinning vinyl on his old record player in Plains, Georgia, with archival footage of performances by Willie Nelson, Aretha Franklin, Jimmy Buffett, Paul Simon, and more during his White House years. She also scores interviews with stars from Bob Dylan to Bono.
Stir spoke to Wharton, whose credits include an impressive array of music documentaries about Joan Baez, David Bowie, The Doors, Elton John, Jimi Hendrix, and more.
Your timing is perfect with this one. Did you work hard to get it out on the eve of the election?
“We started making this documentary in 2018 and it felt relevant then. And there was a moment where we were like ‘Oh my gosh, we really have to get this out, because it might not be relevant two years from now. ‘ But it just continues to be more and more relevant all the time!
“One of the things we felt the most pressure about in the beginning was that, at the time, Carter was approaching 94 and we wanted to get it out while he was still alive….We wanted him to be able to see the film. Our producer Chris Farrell made a promise to him early on that we would make this film in time for him to see it. And little did we know in the beginning what an extraordinary human being President Carter is, to not only have survived to the ripe old age of 96 but to still be vibrant and sharp and alert and aware and connected with what’s going on in the world. He’s just sort of not a normal person on any level!”
What was it like hanging out with Jimmy Carter, shooting him with his old record player?
“Well, the place where we shot the scenes with him and his record player were at his mother’s home in Plains, Georgia, which now serves as a kind of office for his staff because it’s right down the road from his house. But it’s also the house that his father had built in probably the late ‘30s. And Plains is the cutest little town, which you see in the film.
“And that was a great day shooting with him in his mother’s house….By then we had met a bunch of the people around him, we had interviewed his son and had talked to a bunch of other folks, and he had a better sense of us—that we didn’t have any other ulterior motives, and that we weren’t trying to trick him into talking about, you know, the Iran hostage crisis and where he went wrong in his presidency. We really genuinely wanted to talk to him about music! And he was thrilled by that. He loved talking about music. His face lights up on screen. I’ve seen a lot of interviews with him over the years and I never saw one where he had so much joy on his face.”
A lot of people say it’s not a political documentary, it’s a music documentary. How do you describe it?
“I always approached this as a music documentary. Because that’s what I do: I’ve done a lot of music documentaries over the years and I’m not a historian; I’m not a political expert other than just reading the newspaper everyday.
“So the music aspect of it is what drew me to this story and it was what was surprising to me. I thought there would probably be a lot of other people who wouldn’t know that aspect of President Carter’s life and his story. The fact that there are some politics in it is just sort of a byproduct of the subject, as opposed to a political documentary that happens to have some music in it.
“And I liked the idea of subverting the classic music documentary form to tell this different kind of story. It gave me a little bit of pleasure to co-opt that format in this way, because it felt like something that had never really been tried before. And it was challenging! There were moments where I was like, ‘I don’t know if this is really going to work.’ But we were able to find a musical connection to some of the major political parts of his life story.
“And then there was finding out how he got through the most difficult challenge of his life, which was the Iran hostage crisis: one of the ways he was able to cope with the pressure he was under was to go listen to gospel music—Willie Nelson singing gospel music. When he told us that that, for me it was such a watershed moment, because I knew that there would be a lot of documentaries about Jimmy Carter come out in the next five or 10 years and they would all talk about the Iran hostage crisis as the defining thing of his presidency. But this little detail of him listening to gospel music was so telling about his personality. Not even his staff knew about this story when we told them about it.
“That was special to me because it was like we had this key into his soul in a way—that music was like a balm to him. And what people say over and over to me when they see this film is that this film feels like a balm right now. or a tonic for our troubled times, because it connects you to the power that music has over our hearts. Music has this incredible power to remind us that we are all alike while we are different, and music is the thing that as humans we are driven to create. Right? Like there’s no reason to make music. When you look at hunter-gatherers and the earliest days of humanity, music serves no purpose in terms of keeping us alive. And yet could you imagine being alive without music?”
You got to talk to an incredible roster of musicians for this film—even Bob Dylan, who never does interviews. Does that speak to the fact that they see him not just as a fan but a friend?
“We’re all fans of those guys. But why is Willie Nelson a fan of Jimmy Carter? So that part of it was, ‘Let’s find out.’ It is a true friendship between Carter and all these different people. They all have these individual relationships, but what is common to all of them is that Carter has always maintained a very strong moral compass. And you kind of know where you stand with him. He’s very authentic and very true to his moral compass and that is a rare quality in any person, let alone a politician. and I think that’s what these musicians connected with.
Director Mary Wharton. Photo by Eva Mueller
“There’s a great line from the famous songwriter Harlan Howard that says that the only thing you need to write a song is ‘three chords and the truth.’ Songwriters are always looking for truth. And that’s one of the things that Jimmy Carter stood for. One of his campaign slogans was “I will never tell a lie to the American public.” And coming out of Watergate and that dark period of American history, young people were disillusioned by a government that had been lying to them; they had been disillusioned by the corruption that they saw, the Vietnam War. This will sound familiar to you now, but there was a lot of distrust in the American government then and Jimmy Carter offered the truth. That’s why he connected with voters and that’s why he connected with musicians.”
You mention how this resonates now with the whole idea of truth and fake news in American politics. What can people take out of this movie as they head toward an election in the U.S. What lessons can they take from Carter’s leadership?
“One of the things Chris and I talked about a lot when we were making the film was we live in a democracy, and with democracy, there’s the whole saw about ‘you get the government you deserve, not necessarily the one that you want.’ So I think the lesson here is that not only should we demand that our leaders exhibit the kind of leadership that we’re looking for but also we need to demand more of ourselves.
“With the results of the 2016 election, I think there was a certain element of just believing the polls and thinking that something was a fait accompli when in fact it was not. If we’re not happy with the way things are going, we could have done more then and we should do more now. There’s a certain element of being disconnected from society and from each other and from the world right now—believing that just by clicking a little thumbs up icon on your phone that you are interacting with someone, when the only thing you’re interacting with is a global media empire.
“I think the lesson here is that if you look back at that time, you see people interacting with each other. Jimmy Carter won the presidency by having a boots-on-the-ground campaign. He had this group of people he called the Peanut Brigade, and they went around knocking on doors and sitting at people’s kitchen tables and talking to them about how they were going to vote and what Jimmy carter planned to do when he was president. Now unfortunately that’s not something that can happen due to the COVID situation, but it speaks to the fact we need to talk to each other more. We need to demand more of ourselves and we need to demand more from our leaders. But we will get the democracy we’ve earned. So earn it! That, and music will save us all in the end.”
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