Griffin Dunne talks about his aunt, the subject of a new documentary that charts her rise and the impact her work had on a generation of would-be writers

Perhaps surprisingly, Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, which is available on Netflix from 27 October, is the first documentary about a writer whose body of work helped define and record American life, particularly during the restive 60s and 70s. From the Manson murders and the Iran-Contra affair to the Salvadoran civil war and her own bereavement, Didion tackled them all with her signature lyricism and savvy. And for the actor Griffin Dunne, Didion’s nephew, finding a way to render that legacy in film was his tallest task.

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“The challenge was what can I say or show that she hasn’t already written?” Dunne, who recently starred in I Love Dick and House of Lies, said. “It was tremendous pressure making a film about someone I’m related to and care so deeply about.”

The documentary takes a loosely chronological structure, but more than anything it’s arranged around Didion’s best-known writing. There are segments devoted to her reporting from the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the late 1960s, as well as Didion’s political journalism from the 90s, her essay on the Central Park Five, the screenplay Panic in Needle Park, and her later autobiographical works, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, both heart-wrenching voyages through Didion’s grief after the deaths of her husband and daughter.

It was when Didion asked Dunne to shoot a short promotional video for that last book that Dunne asked for a favor in return: could he make a film about his aunt? “I realized there had never been a documentary about her, by her own choice, so I thought I’d push my luck and ask her if she’ll allow me to make one,” he said. “In typical Joan fashion, she went, ‘Uh, OK,’ and I took that as a yes. Then it really sunk in what an enormous subject I had taken on, how influential [her work’s] been on so many people’s lives, the way they live their lives or where they live or if they become a writer or not. So I felt a real obligation to her readers to get it right.”

In order to do just that, Dunne reached out to those who had run in the same circle as Didion for decades, including the writer Calvin Trillin and her former editor Bob Silvers, of the New York Review of Books. There’s an appearance from Harrison Ford – who worked for Didion and her husband as a carpenter – and the Vogue editor Anna Wintour, the New Yorker critic Hilton Als, the actor Vanessa Redgrave and the playwright David Hare. The result is a comprehensive exploration of both Didion and the razor-sharp sensibility that catapulted her to literary stardom. As Als says in the film: “The weirdness of America somehow got into this person’s bones and came out on the other side of a typewriter.”

I think Trump just bores her as a writer. He doesn’t have any subtext Griffin Dunne

To Dunne, no piece exemplifies his aunt’s osmotic relationship with the chaos of mid-century America more than the title essay of her first book, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. “The way she can compartmentalize being a mother who is writing about displaced children during the height of the Summer of Love while other people are looking at hippies kissing and smoking pot,” he said. “She’s missing her own daughter while witnessing a five-year-old child tripping on acid that she’s been given by her parents. She recognized that as a golden opportunity for a journalist to report.”



Given his lifelong proximity to her, part of Dunne’s motivation to make the documentary was the opportunity to introduce Didion’s fans to the woman he knows as Aunt Joan. “In researching and reading the criticism about her work, she’s always been painted as this mystic, gloomy figure, walking around the apartment thinking about death and having nervous breakdowns all day,” he said. “But she’s hilariously funny, she laughs a lot and loves to laugh, and she’s devoted.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Joan Didion at home. Photograph: Dorothy Hong/Dorothy Hong (commissioned)

Dunne got a taste of just how feverishly people would take to the film when he started a Kickstarter campaign three years ago to raise money for it. A teaser video gained traction and, within one day, the project reached a fundraising goal – but it wasn’t quite enough. Then, Netflix got onboard. “The reaction from the trailer went viral and it showed Netflix just what a hunger there was to see a movie like this. It confirmed that this particular writer has a passionate audience that was just dying to see it. I’ve never experienced that much anticipation for a movie I’ve been involved with.”

Part of Didion’s eternal appeal, Dunne explains, is how inviting her writing is, a quality that manifests itself in pieces like The White Album and On Self-Respect, where it often seems like she’s working her thoughts out on the page, delicately spinning a web of whimsical prose and shrewd reporting. In the documentary, though, Didion, now 82, keeps her answers short and sweet, exhibiting an economy of language readers will recognize from her work.

“No one is going to accuse her of being a chatterbox,” he jokes. “She would answer sometimes with three words and then sit there in silence. I’ve grown to become comfortable in those silences because she is. When she’s finished saying what she wanted to say, she’s done.”

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Reading an essay like Inside Baseball, in which Didion picks apart the stagecraft of American politics through the framework of the 1988 presidential campaign, or Clinton Agonistes, a whip-smart inquiry into Bill Clinton’s impeachment proceedings, one wonders what she thinks about our current political maelstrom. After spending months by her side working on the documentary, Dunne, who was counseled by his uncle never to ask Didion about a piece she’s working on, knew the question was unavoidable.

“We did talk about it a bit. When she was writing Inside Baseball, she would talk about the subversive messages that political leaders were trying to convey, and how the media was interpreting what was being said. She would see it in an entirely different way. That’s always been her strength as a writer, to not follow the hysteria of the mainstream.

“I think Trump just bores her as a writer. He doesn’t have any subtext. There is no message that he’s trying to subvert. And she really, truly tires of him, of the reality TV aspect of how he conducts his leadership. So I think she just prefers to leave it to others.”

While that may be a loss for us, the arrival of Dunne’s documentary, exactly 50 years after the publication of his aunt’s most famous essay, Goodbye to All That, almost makes up for it.