An interview with Film Director Bess Kargman
By Noma Faingold
(July 18, 2024)
Director Bess Kargman knew going in that prolific songwriter Diane Warren, the subject of her latest documentary, doesn’t fully trust anybody. “It’s not in her nature,” Kargman said. “The biggest challenge was earning her trust. I had to navigate when to push her. She would get really anxious sitting in a chair too long and being away from her work.”
Diane Warren: Relentless screens on August 3, at 3:30 p.m., at the Piedmont Theatre, (4186 Piedmont Ave., Oakland) during the 44th Annual San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, July 18-August 4. Complete Festival Information and tickets.
The documentary manages to capture the enigmatic, driven, self-taught talent by displaying her many facets with nuance – her flippant sense of humor, single-minded work ethic, along with all her dichotomies.
For example, Warren has unwavering self-belief, yet she looks for outside reassurance about her work. Being nominated for 15 Oscars for Best Song, but losing each time, will do that to anyone. She was finally awarded an Honorary Oscar in 2022, the first bestowed by the Academy’s Board of Governors to a songwriter. It was one of the happiest days of her life.
Warren has written virtually all of her 400-plus songs alone, including major hits, “Rhythm of the Night,” (DeBarge 1985), “Nothin’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” (Starship 1987), “If I Could Turn Back Time,” (Cher 1989), “Because You Loved Me,” (Celine Dion 1996), “Unbreak My Heart” (Toni Braxton 1996), “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” (Aerosmith 1998, from the film “Armageddon”), “I Was Here” (Beyonce 2011) and “Til It Happens to You” (Lady Gaga 2015).
Diane Warren’s 60 Top Hits- short clips from each song:
She deeply loves animals, yet avoids romantic entanglements. Somewhat ironically, Warren’s most successful power ballads are about love. She acknowledges that her fertile imagination feeds the material. In “Relentless,” Paul Stanley of Kiss said, “It’s easier to write about heartache when you don’t have to live it, but you fear it.”
According to Warren, her relatable lyrics take shape by making herself the main character of a song. “She doesn’t seek romantic love but she taps into that part of her own deep, meaningful relationships and puts it into her work,” Kargman said. “Diane taught me you can use your imagination and everything around you. Her wheels are always turning. Diane can’t really shut off her creative mind… ever.”
The extremely disciplined Warren, 67, shows up for work every day to the Los Angeles building she owns housing her Realsongs publishing company and studio. The public spaces have an industrial, artistic flare and are welcoming. However, the work spaces where she creates, are a disaster. Papers are in piles all over the floor, covering almost every surface, along with old newspaper clippings, outdated landline phones and cassette tapes. Mismatched floor lamps are randomly placed around the room. A couple are tipped over. There’s a Post-it Note on the wall that reads, “Don’t clean in here Thanx.”
The space she named, “The Cave,” is where all the magic happens. She superstitiously believes changing one thing could ruin everything she has built over the last 35 years.
“She’s like a hoarder but she doesn’t need an intervention,” Kargman said. “The only stuff she hoards is related to her music.”
Warren hates the idea of revealing her songwriting “process,” comparing it to being filmed having sex.
On the other hand, she let Kargman shoot several intimate, vulnerable moments, including a major personal loss. Warren also matter-of-factly talked about being on the Asperger’s spectrum. All Warren asked of Kargman was that the documentary show Warren’s wicked sense of humor. “The only promise she asked of me was to make it funny, because she is funny,” Kargman said. “To her credit, she didn’t want a puff piece. She wanted warts and all.”
As a filmmaker, Kargman, best known for the 2011 documentary, First Position, which is set during a youth ballet competition, sought to “show Diane’s world and all its complexities. There is no one like her,” Kargman said. “I wanted the audience to experience that. You’ve gotta make them laugh and you gotta make them cry.”
Warren grew up in a middle-class Jewish household in Van Nuys, California. She developed an obsession with music as a pre-teen. She idolized the Beatles. She studied the Billboard charts. In school, she was a terrible student. While she didn’t respond well to guitar lessons, she was able to learn to play piano and guitar on her own. She couldn’t really sing but continued to plug away at songwriting. She didn’t want to be a “star.” She did, however, want her name between the parentheses on 45s. She had no connections in the music business but she was determined to find her way in.
In the last three decades, she’s become one of the most commercially successful songwriters who ever lived, with a publishing company valued at $500 million. “There was no Plan B. I don’t know how to do anything else,” Warren said in the doc. “This isn’t a job. It’s my life. You can’t retire from your life.”
Growing up, her father was somewhat supportive, but her mother discouraged her at every turn. She was exiled to the metal shed in the backyard to create because no one at home was particularly tolerant to the repetitive methods of Warren’s songwriting “process.”
Not surprisingly, she was rebellious. She ran away from home for a short time and did drugs. Those episodes hardly derailed her from her deep immersion in music. She developed her relentlessness during her pre-success years. Her go-to attitude became, “Fuck you. I’ll prove you wrong,” as Warren said in the film. “My mom was the first one I had to do that with.”
Indeed, in archival snapshots shown in the doc, it was like a montage of Warren’s seemingly favorite pose of flipping the bird.
“She’s a motherfucker. My kind of girl,” said producer/songwriter Quincy Jones, one of the many significant artists and executives interviewed in the film, who have worked with Warren, including Cher, Clive Davis, Jerry Bruckheimer, David Foster, Common and Jennifer Hudson.
“Music was saving my life every day and to this day,” Warren said in Relentless.
No matter how the music industry evolves or devolves and, as the trends come and go, Warren keeps writing songs with the goal of her work being genre-less and timeless. And, in her own mind, she’s only as good as her latest creation.
As good friend Cher said at the beginning of the film, “She’s crazy but she writes great songs.”
The 91-minute Diane Warren: Relentless, which took nearly three years to make, had its world premiere in March at South by Southwest (SXSW), the annual event held in Austin, Texas, that showcases film, music and interactive media. The doc has been sold and will have theater distribution, prior to streaming. Release dates have yet to be announced.
Kargman, a former dancer and collegiate athlete, is originally from the Boston area. She earned degrees from Amherst College and the graduate program at the Columbia School of Journalism. For the last 10 years, she has lived in Los Angeles with her husband and two children.
Warren and Kargman hit it off right away. “I’m not a genius or on the spectrum but we are pretty similar,” Kargman said. ”We both have a foul sense of humor and have extreme pride in our work. We are both Jewish and we bonded over that in the first five minutes. We are both determined Jewish women, who have an appreciation for designer shoes. Can you imagine a non-Jewish dude doing a film about Diane?”
Kargman kept a professional distance while filming, describing the shooting schedule as “swooping in and out of Diane’s life.” She declined all of Warren’s invitations to social events, unless she could bring her camera. “Now I will nurture that friendship,” she said.
Director and co-producer Kargman is satisfied that she accomplished what set out to do in shaping Warren’s journey as an underdog, trauma survivor and a unique creative force. The moment Kargman knew she had earned Warren’s respect, if not trust, came immediately after the screening at SXSW. Before the two of them went on stage for the audience Q&A, an emotional Warren said to her, “You made me cry, you fucking bitch.”
Diane Warren: Relentless screens on Saturday, August 3, at 3:30 p.m., at the Piedmont Theatre, (4186 Piedmont Ave., Oakland) during the 44th Annual San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. More information and tickets can be found here.
Another film of interest will be a sneak preview of Janis Ian: Breaking Silence about the singer/songwriter.
“At the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the mid-1960s, teenage singer-songwriter Janis Ian’s hit song about an interracial relationship, “Society’s Child,” launched her illustrious career but also ignited controversy. Over the next six decades, Ian jammed with Jimi Hendrix, partied with Janis Joplin, and played duets with Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson. But she also had to work to overcome the stigma of her debut, homophobia, record industry misogyny, and a life-threatening illness to produce an indelible body of work that continues to draw large audiences around the globe. Janis Ian: Breaking Silence chronicles the singer’s epic life journey from her Jewish childhood on a chicken farm in New Jersey through the release of the disruptive album Breaking Silence, which she leveraged to come out publicly about her gay marriage. With access to Ian’s incredible body of music, her vast archive, family, friends, famed collaborators, and music journalists, this in-depth documentary balances the intimacy of a home movie against a sweeping historical and contemporary context.”
Director Varda Bar-Kar and Janis Ian will attend the showing on Sunday July 21, 2024 at 5:30 p.m. Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, San Francisco.
Join Director Bess Kargman and legendary songwriter Diane Warren as they discuss the film.
Official website for Diane Warren: Relentless
Film Music and appearances IMDB
Diane Warren Website and Social Media
Songs in movies and music videos.
See end of article below for several songs, award wins, and interviews.
Music Legend Diane Warren Performs Her 12 Oscar-Nominated Songs in Five Minutes
Bess Kargman is a critically acclaimed director, producer and editor. Most recently she won a 2021 Producer’s Guild Award and was nominated for two Emmy’s and a Critic’s Choice Award. Her credits include the feature length documentary Diane Warren: Relentless (SXSW Film Festival premiere) and First Position (Toronto International Film Festival premiere), along with the six part documentary series Defying Gravity: The Untold Story of Women’s Gymnastics, and the ESPN 30 For 30 short film, Coach, which won the Jury Prize at Tribeca Film Festival. Prior to becoming a filmmaker, Kargman worked as a journalist after graduating from Amherst College and Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. She lives in Los Angeles but is a proud (born-and-raised) Bostonian.
Photos of Diane Warren in her studio and of director Bess Kargman courtesy of the filmmaker.
Noma Faingold is a writer and photographer who lives in Noe Valley. A native San Franciscan who grew up in the Sunset District, Faingold is a frequent contributor to the Richmond Review and Sunset Beacon newspapers, among others. She is obsessed with pop culture and the arts, especially film, theater and fashion.
A FEW MUSIC VIDEOS- Listen and watch dozens of complete songs by their hit making singers on Diane’s YouTube channel.
Tina Karol & Diane Warren – One Nation Under Love
One Nation Under Love (Ukranian version)
Becky G- The Fire Inside
Times Like This (Behind the Scenes)
eatdrinkfilms.com 