"Everybody needs an honest shake"

Academy Award-winning director Barbara Kopple talks about her new Dixie Chicks movie, "Shut Up & Sing," and why she hopes their fans will forgive them.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Movies, Arts & Entertainment, Dixie Chicks

Photo: The Weinstein Company

Photo composite of Barbara Kopple and the Dixie Chicks.

Oct. 27, 2006 | Talk with filmmaker Barbara Kopple for just five minutes and you understand immediately how she makes the kinds of movies she does. In 1976 Kopple won an Academy Award for her first feature, "Harlan County, U.S.A.," a documentary detailing a bitter, drawn-out strike among Kentucky coal miners, a case of men and women taking a stand against big business even though doing so threatened not just the fabric of their community, but also their lives. Kopple won another Academy Award in 1991 with "American Dream," which chronicled a workers' strike at a Minnesota meatpacking plant. Since then, she has made a fiction feature (last year's "Havoc"), and her documentary subjects have included figures as disparate as Woody Allen and Mike Tyson.

Through 2005 and well into 2006, Kopple and her co-director, Cecilia Peck, followed the Dixie Chicks on tour and behind the scenes. The picture they've made, "Shut Up & Sing," which opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday and in other cities beginning on Nov. 10, is without a doubt a political documentary, a picture in which the views of its subjects -- Natalie Maines, Martie Maguire and Emily Robison -- emerge not just in the things they say (beginning with Maines' now-famous anti-Bush comment, made in 2003) but in how they go about conducting their business, and their lives. Kopple's sensibility helps shape the picture, of course -- that's part of the job of a good documentarian. But watching "Shut Up & Sing," you're always aware that Kopple and Peck are painting a portrait for us, in brushstrokes of words, music and pictures, as opposed to telling us what to think. As a piece of political filmmaking, "Shut Up & Sing" pulls off the feat of being subtle and direct at once.

In conversation, Kopple's warmth and kindness come through immediately, as does a sense of self-effacing confidence. But it's also clear that Kopple isn't the sort who's given to finding only nice things to say about everyone. She seems to have a far more rare and more valuable gift: You get the sense she is blessed with the curiosity to find out what's really there in a person, and to figure out how that informs the story she's telling.

Salon spoke with Kopple, a youthful-looking 60, in New York, where she talked about why she thinks documentaries have captured the interest of the public in recent years, about the importance of avoiding cheap shots in documentary filmmaking, and about what she learned from the Dixie Chicks. (You can listen to a podcast of the interview here.)

The co-director of "Shut Up & Sing," Cecilia Peck, isn't here today. Can you tell me how you and she started working together?

Cecilia and I have known each other and been friends for 10 years. We met in Cannes; I was doing a documentary that someone had asked me to do, about the underworkings of the Cannes Film Festival. Cecilia was at that time [working as a writer], and the producers put her on the film not for the shooting part of it, but to help them coordinate things. It wasn't really a wonderful experience for any of us, doing this film, because the producers were a little strange. So it was difficult. But I met Cecilia, and that was incredible for me, and I think also for her.

She went back to Los Angeles, and I went back to New York. And I said to her, "I want to show you how wonderful documentaries can be. Would you ever consider coming to New York and working on some of the films I'm doing?" She said yes, and there she was.

In the meantime, her father, Gregory Peck, was doing a one-man show. And she said, "Nobody has ever filmed my dad." And I said, "OK, we'll all go out and do one show and give it to your folks as a gift." So we went to Boston and we filmed, and then we couldn't tear ourselves away from doing a film about the Peck family. A year later, we were still doing it. And that's what started us really working together. Our friendship got very close. And neither one of has an ego at all ... It's all about the story. We think a lot alike. And it just works.

And how did "Shut Up & Sing" come about?

We have a mutual friend, Cecilia and I, who knows the Dixie Chicks really well, and he would often talk about them. Even before they made the comment -- they were just starting out on their "Top of the World" tour -- we thought, Wow, wouldn't it be interesting to do a film on them? So we got in touch with them and said we would love to do a film. But they said, "No, we've just hired this Web-site crew, and they're going to travel with us."

Then they made the comment. And we were totally fired up: We could have been there! We could have been filming all this! So we wrote a proposal, and we hounded them. They just really had to come to terms with, Do we want a documentary crew hanging out with us all the time? It's such an invasion of privacy. They looked not only at us but at other filmmakers too, to make sure about the chemistry. And they chose us -- the rest is history.

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