Director Margaret Brown has passionately detailed Townes Van Zandt’s life in a documentary that breaks the insipid Behind the Music mold. A true fan, Brown truly inhabits the world of Van Zandt’s songs. Her film, Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt, is both a revelation and vindication of one’s conviction in loving an artist that no one else seems to have ever heard of. While a lesser filmmaker would have reduced the man to myth, glorifying his legendary drug and alcohol addictions and tragic death, Brown presents a well-rounded portrait of a man who “blew off” his loved ones, his freedoms, his happiness for his art, and the consequences of those actions (interviews with his children are particularly sobering and heartbreaking). With fiction films like Ray and Walk the Line presenting the warts-and-all true-life stories of legendary musicians, Brown’s film reveals with searing honesty the price of becoming a legend. Elegiac and haunting, Be Here to Love Me transcends the music documentary genre to become bigger than its subject and his cult of admirers.

Danielle McCarthy spoke with Margaret Brown about Be Here to Love Me on the eve of its theatrical release.

RS: Why did you decide to make this film?

MB: Well Sam [Brumbaugh, producer], who was my housemate in Brooklyn eight years ago, had this really extensive record collection, and sometimes at night when we first moved in together we would play records, and we would have sort of a mini competition of who could play the best thing that the other person had never heard of. My dad’s a songwriter, so I thought I knew a lot about music, but one night Sam played a Townes [Van Zandt] record. He played “Waiting Around to Die,” and it really struck me. So that started my interest in Townes’s music. But it wasn’t until I went down to Austin, Texas, where I now live, that I would hear stories about Townes, because down in Austin he’s sort of a mythic figure and people in bars would tell me stories. I read an article about him and people always talked about how he lived his life for his art, and everything else fell away.

So personally I was really interested in that idea because my dad was a songwriter too, and while I had a really stable childhood I knew that to be a great artist you really have to live your art. For me this film was a chance to explore that idea through his incredible music and his life and all the people around him.

RS: [laughs] I think the problem with those Behind the Music documentaries is that they glorify that decision to live your art and make minimal note that really living for your art has consequences on a person’s life and their family. I think you see that in this film, and it’s really heartbreaking. It’s a film about choices.

MB: Yeah, I wanted to make something that was about family, but I don’t think even if someone was paying me to do it I would make a Behind the Music kind of documentary. I wanted to make something that was more of a collage with stuff that you wouldn’t necessarily expect to fit together and you figure it out later on. There’s this moment when Townes is talking about his music, and then it cuts to Katie Belle and she’s singing one of his songs, and until that point in the movie you don’t even know he had a daughter, and it reveals in that moment that it’s 2002 — when you saw him before it’s 1983. I cut so you would feel these things and the shifts in the narrative so the story builds but not in a chronological order.

RS: It’s very interesting how it jumps around in time. There’s also a lot of space in the film, and everyone is so open. It’s pretty remarkable—I don’t know how you managed to get them to be so candid. Did you just build a relationship with them?

MB: Honestly, sometimes I had a hard time believing that people were telling me the things they were telling me just because I asked them. There’s that Janet Malcolm book, The Journalist and the Murderer, about how much your subject trusts you, and in the book it’s about a murderer who becomes best friends with this journalist who ultimately betrays him, and it’s really about that quandary in any kind of journalism or documentary filmmaking. I’m not necessarily going to tell the story you want me to tell, and I’m definitely not going to tell the story you’re invested in or is your narrative so it’s amazing when people are so open — but maybe they just trusted me enough or intuited that I wasn’t going to somehow betray them. It’s quite a responsibility.

RS: I think it is a very even portrayal—there’s no real villain.

MB: Well, I think there are some villains.

RS: But you let us decide whether we think they’re a villain or not. You may have your opinions…

MB: I sure do!

RS: But you don’t manipulate us into thinking, well, I don’t want to name names…

MB: Well, there’s truth and there’s truth. I felt like so much of Townes is about myth that it’s almost like, do I always have to tell the truth? I mean there are some things in the film that I know aren’t true, and I’m not really going to say what those things are, but I felt like it’s better to overall service an emotional truth and that the story is truer with myth in it.

RS: Specifically the stuff with Guy and Susannah Clark is unbelievable. I couldn’t believe what they were saying.

MB: Well, with them it’s a little different because they were a little triumvirate: those three people spent a lot of time together, and they were all really close, and I think that Guy and Susannah sort of decided they were going to give what they have to me, and it was weird for me to receive that, but they put themselves in a place where they were able to do that. There was this one journalist who wrote a book about Townes and said that Guy did that knife game with your hands or put a knife in his hand, I can’t remember but it was some kind of story like that. Guy and Townes used to have this thing they called “Skinning a Yank,” where it’s basically how to take advantage of a Yankee.

RS: Well, maybe since you’re from Alabama they trust you more and maybe there’s something interesting about the way you approached it as a woman.

MB: Well, the family theme of the film was not added until the very end. I knew I wanted the film to feel like a collage and not have a typical three-act structure. I edited the film using orderly note cards, but the biggest, most important theme I put in at the end was the family, and that just wasn’t an element until the end of editing, and it is so hard to believe that because it would not have been as good without the emotional resonance of the family.

RS: I really like how you hold off introducing Townes in the beginning. You use people’s stories about Townes (like Joe Ely describing meeting Townes in Lubbock) and the majority of “Rake,” which is one of my favorite Townes songs, to really introduce to him.

MB: That song is very epic feeling.

RS: How did you decide to introduce him?

MB: He’s a mysterious character so I wanted there to be mystery before you see him. You do see glimpses of him, but we used optical printing to obscure him a bit, like by cutting the frame almost before you see his face.

RS: The first time you actually see him is on the television.

MB: I think the first intimate moment is when he’s playing live in 1974 and he’s playing “Pancho & Lefty,” and then it slowly moves in and you’re starting to get to know him at that moment.

RS: Well, because he’s now gone, the archival footage really has to tell the story. And all that archival footage is a goldmine to Townes’s fans because none of it has been seen before.

MB: The only stuff people have seen is the two minutes in the film that are in a film called Heartworn Highways [dir. James Szalapksi] that just got re-released on DVD and was originally released theatrically in 1976, but everything else has not really been seen before now.