by FilmInk Staff
At first, I’m Wanita appears to be a conventional rockumentary, except here the music is Honky Tonk, a sub-genre of Country, a style that hasn’t been fashionable for more than half a century.
The film’s central character, Wanita, dubs herself the ‘Queen of Honky Tonk,’ and lives in Tamworth, where the local music industry works hard at ignoring her formidable gifts.
But as the film rolls out, details of a complicated life emerge sending the film off into fascinating directions. Charitable to a fault, Wanita goes out of her way to help strangers, and the down-on-their-luck while she alienates husband, daughter and close friends. For years, she has supplemented her musical life with a side-line as a sex worker…and meanwhile, she plots a trip to the USA where she hopes to record an entire album in Nashville, just like her heroes Loretta Lynne and Patsy Cline.
Like the Maysles Brothers’ classic Salesman, I’m Wanita, is a sublime observational style deep dive into a sub-culture, a lifestyle and personality, and what emerges is a human portrait of talent and struggle…and obsession.
We spoke to Matthew Walker ahead of the I’m Wanita premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival.
How did the film come about?
“A friend told me about Wanita. They told me that interesting things happen around her! [Laughs]. Someone suggested I go up to Tamworth and film her. I thought ‘yes’ would be a more interesting answer to that suggestion than ‘no’.”
Walker filmed Wanita over four days in 2014 and this became the basis for the short documentary Heart of the Queen (2015). It played at Antenna Film Festival. A major success there, Walker was encouraged to expand it as a feature.
A lot of films are about ‘winners.’ That’s not exactly Wanita’s journey…
“Yeah [Laughs]. Well, her story really resonated. I have hung around musos, played in amateur bands and I ended up a singer and wrote songs… I have always been fascinated by those bands that [are talented] but never get anywhere. Yet, had they been tapped at the right moment, by say, a record company, they would be famous. That was a real driver for me, in Wanita’s story.”
Wanita has tremendous self-belief.
“Yes! She has this belief that she is a country music legend. She has kept every single piece of press ever written about her since she was ten years old. She has put a lot of effort into the legend. Yet, the industry ignores her.”
We don’t really hear from the ‘industry’ in the film, we’re free to speculate as to those factors that may be significant in ‘holding her back’, if we can put it that way. Wanita also states early in the film she has Asperger’s.
“The Asperger’s is a massive thing in the background [of her story].”
We had the impression that people keep her at arms-length.
“Yes. [Though we don’t see it in the film] people are wary of her. They say, ‘she’s got a great voice’…but she can be difficult and all that can be hard to get your head around. I have a history with neuro-divergent people. That was another driver to tell Wanita’s story. They might look like they are being [difficult], but the longer you spend time with them, you realise they see things in a very different light. As she puts it, she’s not able to ‘play The Game’. She talks about being possessed when she sings. Yet, when she does sing, Wanita is a total pro.”
We see that on the road-trip in the USA which dominates the story in the film’s second half. Wanita records her songs in very famous studios in Memphis, New Orleans and Nashville, where she puts down an entire album. The American producers we meet, people who have worked with the big and famous, seem truly gobsmacked. Their ‘where have you been hiding my whole life’ expressions are priceless!
“Yeah. Those reactions are absolutely genuine. They were astonished. They were used to artists coming in and spending forty takes till they got it the way they wanted. Wanita was doing a perfect take first take. They could relate to her. They understood the depth of her instincts, much more so than the ‘professionals’ here. They understood where the music was coming from…the phrasing, the chords, the emotion.”
There’s a lovely moment in a Nashville airport when after a meeting a perfect stranger, a woman grieving over the recent loss of a family member, Wanita performs an impromptu number to comfort her…the woman is so moved…
“You know that’s Wanita. She is happiest when people are giving her attention. Performance is her natural state.”
The road trip / recording in the USA was the realisation of a life-long dream for Wanita but it’s fraught with tension and anxiety. Her friend Archer and her ‘manager’/pal/musical cohort Gleny Rae Virus, seem to be fraying at the edges a bit as the American trip goes on…and on…We got the feeling that what’s in the final was just the tip of the iceberg…
“Yeah! There’s so much in Wanita’s story it could have been fifteen films! In the early cuts we had a lot of explanation…”
About relationships, who was who, what they were the doing?
“Yes. But the more we went through the edit, I took it out. That was the problem…how do you reconcile so many different moods and perspectives? Some might say I approached the edit chaotically. I kept a journal and after filming I wrote a version in prose of the film – it took three months – summarising the footage we had. It ended up being forty thousand words long, the size of a short novel! The edit took a year and all up it was a seven-year project with the feature film taking over three years to complete.”
Wanita has tremendous energy and a gift for language. Throughout, you use very large screen titles that are ‘quotes’ from Wanita – statements about where she’s at emotionally.
“Yes. Some people find them very confronting. Wanita’s use of language is very dramatic and we wanted to highlight that in some way. It was a jolt out of the stream of words. She talks in headlines. But it’s also a way of [reminding the audience about how she feels]… ‘Listen. I’m already saying what I mean’…But she is being ignored.”
What does Wanita think of the finished film?
“Well as she put it, ‘I had a nervous breakdown,’ she told me after the screening [laughs]. But she actually loves it.”
I’m Wanita opens in Sydney and Melbourne cinemas on January 6, 2022
