Jane Fonda On Her New Documentary, The Men In Her Life & More (FULL) | PeopleTV

hello jane fonda hello you oh so there is so this documentary jane fonda in five acts a really honest documentary susan lacey directed the creator of american masters right so she knows what she's doing yeah this is your whole life it's it's you know soup-to-nuts so far the whole life so far this is the beginning of my last act in order to know how to go forward I'm gonna have to know where I've been I am what I am why did you want to do this right now because she asked me you know the fact is I've had a really interesting life and people ask me all the time to do documentaries and then Susan asked and I really admire Susan and the work she did on American masters and and I said to her well I don't want you to do a documentary about a movie star because I'm more than that that's just a part of who I am and I knew that she got that and since you've seen the documentary you know that she she didn't the usual thing I was so in from the very second it starts starts with tape and that totally took me by surprise no you didn't know she was gonna do know I didn't know anything about it it's a recording of richard nixon talking about whatever happened to Jane Fonda well Nixon wasn't perplexed Nixon was furious yeah according to the the secret tapes that are now in Maryland in the files you know he spent more time kvetching about me and trying to you know get me for treason than he did Brezhnev according to insiders said that how threatened did you feel when you heard because the the anti Jane Fonda we have to stop her we're going to you know find her guilty of treason it went all the way to the top of it went all the way to the next in white house yeah at what point did you say I'm not going to let that stop me in fact I'm going to speak more loudly than I have even but it's just my nature you know if I know that what I'm doing is right even though I I certainly made mistakes it's it just it made me more determined to keep going into for them not to stop me keep going means I'm not gonna stop talking about what's wrong with the Vietnam War and then later the corporate control of our economy and other things that I that I speak out about just trying to do it better to learn more and go deeper what did you want to say with the documentary well one thing is the value of being an activist democracy isn't a spectator sport the fact that I went in a hundred percent with all of my being and survived now of course I'm I'm white and I'm privileged and I'm famous so that has to be taken into consideration but the activism saved me I'm here to talk about people whose lives are at stake I am right and I am a movie actress I risk much less the generals of this country are overflowing with people whose only crime is to be black and free and spreading the word around to free other people and this is something that everyone has to become very aware of and so I think I want people to take away a sense of the importance of activism to give you ballast and a core and meaning the importance of always trying to get better and going deeper and becoming a better person I always knew in the midst of the the father and then the three marriages which make up the four acts that if I stop here I'm only gonna be half a person I'm not there's more that I have to to try to achieve and get to not in terms of of career but just as growth as a human being it was interesting given the fact that so much of your story and men and what you are proud of at this point in your life is that you are not defined by a man in your life that you that you know your own heart you know your own moral compass you worked hard to find those things it's just happen no it was a lot of work a lot of pain but the I found it so interesting and honest that the documentary is Jane Fonda in five acts four of those acts are the men in your life it's Henry Fonda and then your three husbands what kind of discussions went into structuring it that way and calling it that we didn't discuss it at all I had no idea what she was gonna do with the voluminous amount of interview she did with me because unlike most most documentaries it's mostly me talking and and incredible archival footage with very few other people most notably my son I didn't know what she was gonna do it took me completely by surprise that she did it the way she did in five acts and I completely understand why as I talked about in my book up until my 60s I was to a large extent defined by the men in my life you know I I was brought up to please I wanted my father to love me and so I would turn myself into a pretzel to be what he wanted me to be and it just took me a long time to get over it you know we're born and usually we don't get to choose our parents and so there are issues and there are wounds and there are handicaps and you spend the rest of your life trying to get over them and it took me into my 60s and then I began to become who I was supposed to be [Music] in the documentary as you do also in your memoir you've talked about one particular photo it was a family photo sort of a staged picnic at your house in Greenwich when you were a little girl and you it is you and your brother your stepsister your father and your mother but that that photo says so much to you and about you and part of that as your mother and the look on her face of real stress what do you what does that photo say to you about your family my family was falling apart my mother at that time was in and out of mental institutions and my father was was was seeing another woman just a little bit older than me seven years older than me and he was he was he he was there because he felt an obligation to come home for he was doing mr. Roberts but he would come home on Sunday when he didn't have any performances but he wasn't really there and you can see in the photograph you know I'm looking at him and he's looking away and I can just see where he is he's with her did you know about the affair at the time no you just sensed he was somewhere else yeah and my mother is in the background looking sort of stricken and it just makes me so sad so much of this documentary and you're in your book as well and and we know we sort of saw it happen on screen and on Golden Pond many many years later but a lot of this story in the documentary is about forgiveness and the huge Herculean effort that it takes to understand and forgive parents and you had a particularly traumatic upbringing with both parents when did you decide I need to understand them and I need to forget when I wrote my memoir I dedicated it to my mother who killed herself when I was 12 because I knew that if I did dedicate it to her rather than sweep her under the rug I would be forced to really try to figure her out I never really knew her because she suffered from well they called it manic depression in those days now we say bipolar I already and you actually found you got her medical right I got her medical records and so writing my memoir which took me five years which I later discovered psychologists called doing a life review and they advocated for people who are suffering from depression or or just older what it does when you go back and review your life but really dig in not just then I did this and then I did that but really who were my parents in it it necessitates sometimes getting those photographs and literally looking at them with a magnifying glass and trying to understand what they mean and then who were their parents your grandparents why were they the way they were how did they raise my parents why did and when you can through that kind of research it's almost like being an archaeologist you if you can come to answers which I was able to do you end up being able to say it had nothing to do with me yeah it wasn't that I wasn't lovable they had issues in the minute you know that you can feel tremendous empathy for them and you can forgive and you asked me in the beginning what I would like people to take away the importance of forgiveness is one of the things your son Troy Garity is in isn't is interviewed in the documentary yeah and he says that he believes your relationship with your mother was the defining relationship or her suicide was the defining moment and I was surprised to hear in a way because I know so much about you and your father and about that journey but do you agree with do you agree with Troi that that was that that maybe was the incident of the relationship that had the biggest impact it's it certainly had a big impact but it's not just the actual act of suicide it's what led up to it because you know if you have a parent who is not capable of showing up not capable of reflecting you back through eyes of love it has a big impact on your sense of self and as a child you always think it was your fault because a child can't blame the adult they depend upon adults for survival and so it takes a long time to get over the guilt it's also very difficult for people who come from fractured homes or homes with trauma and abuse to know themselves and then make the right choices in relationships and the people that I know who have it is sure it took me until 50 to figure out sort of to make the right choice and then bit behave correctly in a relationship Yeah right that's something that a lot of people don't realize that if you come from that kind of background a background that's fractured about a background that didn't teach you to love yourself and give you your own sense of self that there needs to be a lot of work done really before you get into relationships otherwise we learn on the job that's not difficult yeah well one thing that I think happens is you tend to be attracted to people and not consciously at all right you know I was certain that in each case of my three husbands that I was moving towards a man who was the polar opposite of my father mm-hmm superficially but deep down you know they were all men and I love them and admire all of them and they were wonderful men and I don't regret it at all but they were not able to show up themselves for addictions and all kinds of reasons and you know I I sometimes wonder I wonder if the really perfect relationship for me came my way and I ran away terrified because I didn't want to be with someone that said come on fun to show up yeah or or I couldn't show up either right do you seem to sense you seem to you find the person who's gonna allow you to recreate those as unpleasant as it might be but but to recreate that the relationships you had as a child with your family yeah yeah not always good yeah I think that's why I'm by myself now I just wasn't dealt a relational deck of cards but you're so different now yeah do you I mean you you know so much about yourself and and do you do you date now you don't I've closed up shop is that what you say to people when they asked you out they don't ask you sure I bet they do no no no probably because you're singing interviews that you've closed up [Music] so the second act of the documentary is Roger Vadim yeah why did you fall in love with Oh everyone fell in love with Roger Vadim men and women Jack valetti the head of the Motion Picture Academy got to know Vadim and every time I would see him he would say I never in my life met a more charming man he was the most well he was handsome he was incredibly sexy and he could charm anyone I mean before me it was Brigitte Bardot Catherine Deneuve Annette's Troy Berg and so forth and I was young and I wanted him to teach me how to be a woman one of the good so he taught me to be a female impersonator I was just getting to that so we were just talking before we started before we started rolling that Barbarella is gonna be showing at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery right and it has become this sort of it has become a camp classic in the years and you have sort of come to love that movie yeah as crazy and silly as it is what do you love about it it's just so fanciful and it's almost feminist I mean after all she's she runs her own spacecraft she is asked by the President of the United States to fly to this planet and and bring back the evil scientist that's been captured you know she's given a lot of responsibility [Music] I got it you know I when it first came out I was just becoming an activist and a feminist and right and I thought it wasn't politically correct and now I appreciate it because it's not it was a funny movie to have out there when you became an activist and a feminist you got a lot of blowback yes sometimes if I was speaking like an in a theater at a rally that the marquee would say come see Barbarella speak that seems like an odd I mean that's that's a little bit hostile you think yeah a little bit a little bit the making of I just want to ask you quickly about the making of Barbarella which actually sounds like the most torturous filmmaking experience almost any actresses ever happen you know I didn't like to get naked and so the opening sequence where I have to get naked and Vadim promised me that the titles would cover everything that needed to be covered he lied but so I just got raging drunk on vodka and it turned out we had to do it a second time because a bat had flown between the camera and and me so we had to do it the next day so I was hungover and drunk again and yeah after the relationship with Vadim ended and you did the film clewd you said something really interesting about that in the documentary which is that you actually found your voice like a lot of women because you thought this was what you were supposed to do you had been speaking in film and in life I assume with a much higher much higher voice like this and then include you literally found your voice and it's the voice that we hear today I feel physically that's what I mean I feel my body feels I enjoy making love with him it's the jane fonda voice the real it's very common for women it starts in puberty when they tried to be popular and fit in and they tend to sort of bifurcate and their real self moves outside because god forbid you know all the things that are interesting about us the anger or the complexities the things you think men won't like I wanted to please men at all costs and until your voice isn't reflecting who you really are it goes very high in your head this is very common Carol Gilligan the feminist psychologist writes a lot about it called in a different voices or famous book and as I started to move back into my own skin my voice dropped was that what was the experience of clewd like for you a complete joy I I loved Alan Pakula so much it was like dancing a great waltz with a perfect partner we were just completely in sync and I just I tapped into something very deep and it was it was wonderful there's the famous story about you spending a lot of time with prostitutes and Madam's to get to know what did you learn about those women when you well I mean I really I've you know I went with them when they bought their cocaine and it was cut in front of them and I watched and I I went to after-hours clubs I mean I really hung out for I saw a lot and all the women that I met seemed so broken it's kind of irreparable broken and that combined with the fact that even within the after-hours Club when they would hook up with their pimps not one pimp even winked at me you looked very different you were not you had the clothes the big blonde hair nobody knew who I was nobody solicited me and I just thought I can't I can't I can't do this I can't really do justice to who this person is supposed to be and I I asked to meet with Ellen and I said Ellen I can't do it I think you let me out of my contract hire Faye Dunaway he said no and he just left me out of the room he told that story a lot he thought it was very funny [Music] when did you fall in love with the your co-star in the third act of this documentary Tom Hayden and what did he change its it's gonna be hard for people to understand this but you know I knew about Tom Hayden I had read some of his books people who knew me always said you should meet Tom Hayden one of the things that I loved about is he was brilliant he was a movement star he came over to my house we we had met briefly he came over to my house and he had a slideshow that he had put together that he wanted to show me and he projected it on the wall of my of my living room about Vietnam and it included the Pentagon Papers which had just recently been released and it was so profound it reflected such sensitivity and intelligence and feeling about see everybody up until then had focused on what we were doing to the Vietnamese and to the ground--and in Vietnam to the country this slideshow focused on who they were who were these people that we were pounding into almost annihilation who were they as people as a culture why are they resisting and then he had talked about what a whole series of administrations Republican and Democrat alike had known which is we can't win and by the time it was over I was in love with him mm-hmm I said to my my roommate I'm gonna marry this guy I did yeah and I miss him I was with him when he died and you know he he made it hard to love him as a husband he wasn't easy which he says you know he says things in the document never heard him say and that I never thought I would live long enough to hear him say like Wow well first of all that he was a womanizer and an alcoholic and and then that because I went to Vietnam and exposed the bombing of the dikes the bombing stopped and I didn't think he would ever say that publicly you know something it's interesting I find a lot of my of my choices now and what I do are in honor of him hmm like I'm spending a lot of time in Michigan he came from Royal Oak Michigan he was the editor of the Michigan daily and I spend a lot of time there he discovered homeboy industries here for me and now I'm on the board of homeboy industries he's very present in my heart his widow Barbara and his son Liam their son our family they're part of the family I love them so much why did it not work out because of the because of the womanizing and alcoholism yeah mm-hmm and I just didn't know how to handle it and you know when he met me I wasn't working very much I wasn't blacklisted but kind of grayish listed and you know so he met a woman who was in transition who was not away a lot I was with him I mean we were and we were a great partnership for a long time and then I started getting more work winning a second Oscar with coming home started the workout and to fund the organization that we started but still he hated it because he saw it as a vanity project and we just grew apart like you say the Jane Fonda workout really started to fund the organization and do good work and then it became this thing a huge thing yeah huge thing and and it just made him feel lonely I think and and he because he was lonely he fell in love with somebody else and and I'm glad he did because gave me an excuse to leave I wouldn't have been able to otherwise as always as a man it's embarrassing to talk about this but men just have a problem when the woman in their life is more successful or a bigger star or gets more attention some men not all men but most men the the sense of masculinity of being a man depends so much on being the breadwinner mm-hmm that when a woman is bringing in more money and is a little more successful it's very hard on the main time had had written scores of books before he married me I wrote the workout book and it became number one on the New York Times for two years that's when they started doing the how-to you know they divided them into categories so never again with the workout be number one instead of Philip Roth or anyway it was hard on Tom for a generation the movies though that you made while you were with Tom there was the workout video and then you mentioned coming home the China Syndrome 9:00 to 5:00 9:00 to 5:00 and these were all on Golden Pond on Golden Pond these were all important movies you really found the kind of movies that you wanted to make that really said something 9:00 to 5:00 people often don't think about that as a the original me to movie it was about women in the workplace and it took on real issues from you say the documentary you know flex hours childcare all of those things are wrapped up in that in that I think people are very excited about a potential nine-to-five reboot you never know it's being written good but you just never know if it's gonna actually work out but we hope so and what will what do you think is different what are the issues that you will take on now yeah well it's very different and I wish I could say it's better but it's not right you know back in the day when we made 9:00 to 5:00 consolidated was the name of the company and you were hired by consolidated nowadays you are contracted by another company that subcontracts you out to consolidated so if you are sexually assaulted if you have wage theft if you are whatever fired because you're pregnant who do you go to there's forced arbitration non-disclosure clauses it's you know plus now that it's all digital online people can spy on you and it's it's really bad it's really bad and we want to expose that you why was an irrelevant apathetic movie star married and living in France and totally unaware of what the role of our country was in Indochina and in the rest of the world and it was the mass movement that existed at that time in the United States that forced me to begin just to think it's also been very touching to me that your awareness and your original anti-war efforts we're because of the GIS and those were the same people that got so angry with you so I'm angry to this day there's a lot to be proud of there there are a lot of things you have apologized for when you look back on that now what's what are you most sorry for but what are you most proud of what I'm most sorry for is that I sat on an anti-aircraft gun and had my picture taken I didn't know that there were cameramen there but the minute I sat down all the flashes and it was like oh my god and it's hard to even explain how it happened I was kind of out of my mind when I look at myself in those images big mistake is that I went by myself right I should not have done that I'm attending to that military site when they proposed but while I was still here in this country and they proposed the Vietnamese the committee that would receive American guests and Americans were going back and forth all the time all kinds of Americans they proposed visiting a military site and I said no I have no interest and yet when it came time at the very end I was like a limp noodle I had experienced so much that I just I went you know if I'd had a more reasonable person with me it would said no you're not going uh-uh it changed me profoundly that trip and it's not that I'm I'm I mean I'm glad that I helped in the bombing of the dikes but I'm I'm grateful that I went because it taught me so much about what really is strength you know we're supposedly this big superpower but we couldn't win we were on the wrong side of history as McNamara realized before he died and learning about what is strength really I'm 80 years old I'm half of my joints are replaced I won't live this that much longer but I'm really strong now when I was at the height of my career I wasn't you know it's just a different way of looking at what is strength that was very very important to me you [Music] when did you get over the eating disorders there was a point in my mid 40s when I realized that that if I continued to be controlled by these addictions that I was going to I don't know if I was going to die but my life would fall apart because as you get older with each binge the fatigue and the hostility and the self-loathing lasts longer and I had a husband and children and a career and I was politically active and I couldn't keep doing it all and allow this addiction to rule my life and so I stopped cold turkey oh it was so hard it was so hard that's really amazing because we also it was something that didn't you have said before you thought it was you and your friend from school and the Romans and you're the only people that knew about I didn't know that it had a name it wasn't talked about no nobody had heard that the word bulimia it was very very difficult and what what the workout because I was doing the workout before I started the business it gave me back a sense of control over my body and and so that you know the longer space time you put between yourself and the addiction the easier it gets and so I've put a few years in between me and my last bout of eating disorders and then I started the workout and that kind of cemented my ability to to eat normally which I can do now people sometimes some people say you can never get over it you can what advice do you give people who are who are going through it and and have to need to stop what do you say to that well I think now there are programs and 12-step programs and you know I think it's important to understand that it has nothing to do with food it has to do with filling a whole you know we're vessels that need to be and you can be full of spirit and I don't necessarily mean that in the purely religious sense but you know there's something that can happen to you when you are no longer an addict where you're connected where you're full of spirit instead of spirits as an alcohol or food or shopping or it's X or whatever and so just understand that it's it's the eating is is is you're trying to fill a hole that you can't feel that way you just can't and there are other ways to felt there are other ways to fill it and you know until I realize that I didn't understand the the third step of the 12 steps in a a a higher power and then suddenly it all became very clear to me because as long as you're an addict you can't open yourself it takes humility and you can't do that if if you're an addict you don't there's this hard dark empty place in you when you're an addict and opening that up takes a a sea change and really a transformation in your psyche that can happen in a and in and in other settings but you need help you do you [Music] the fourth act in the documentary is Ted Turner you talk about why the marriage ultimately ended but you also say this one thing that I was always curious about which was you said there was a voice the loudest voice the louder voice saying it would be so easy to just stay because he was a nice man he was handsome brilliant by the time of the most gorgeous land and you know lighten up fun to come you never have to worry about certain things to work again yeah would have been easy yeah but then there was the other angel on the other shoulder kind of a double virginia woolf sang and it was hard to even hear her voice but if you stay you will die without ever becoming who you can be you will not really be authentic do you think that you have achieved that now I'm still a work in progress but I'm trying Paula Weinstein your friend yes interviewed in the documentary who knows you probably as well as anyone she said something really interesting that the insecurities that you dealt with as a little girl really haven't gone away but you are not all of them but you are aware of them and brave enough to kind of make peace with them or accept them does that sound you can't banish the demons they're still there but you learn to put them in their corner and not let their voices be the governing voices in your head you just learn to manage them you know the way there's certain cancers that are in your body and they'll never go away but you just have to manage them and I've learned to manage my demons pretty much you know you're only as happy as your least happy child so when there's something wrong with one of my kids it kind of sends me into a loop but it doesn't last so tell me about your relationship with your kids you've talked a lot about with with Vanessa you were not present as as a mom we talked about how you said about forgiving your father but how did you set about making sure that Vanessa forgave you well when I realized the importance of understanding who my parents really were mm-hmm so that I could forgive myself and understand that it wasn't my fault if they didn't love me entirely that's when I wrote my memoir I was really writing it for my kids but especially for my daughter I don't think that she's able to read it now yet in a way that can be really helpful for her like when I first read my father's autobiography which he didn't write he was a wonderful writer I wish he had written it himself but you know I got a lot more out of it after he passed and I was ready to write my memoirs and then I went back and read it again and I saw so many things that I had missed I understood so many things that I hadn't understood and I think when I go my daughter will be able to read my memoir and understand you [Music] there's a series of questions that I have here as we wrap it up we call this the kegel exercise you just fill in the blank then you can take a pass on any of these all right that you are close friends describe me as brave strangers describe me as a role model only I know that I am a work in progress the movie I've seen the most times is Love Actually oh that's a good one right yeah I think that might be mine as well at least once a year yeah I start every day by doing taking my dog out a lot of people love it but I think Blanc is totally overrated reality TV I think I'm really good at forgiving I think I'm really bad at being cynical the best advice I ever received is never go into a business you don't understand my greatest extravagance is books the thing about myself I've learned to love is my resilience the teacher I'm most grateful for is katherine hepburn who you did you spend a lot of time with her other than on Golden Pond ever what did she teach you the importance of how you present to the world which I had never thought about and it made her very angry that I hadn't have thought about him I always thought that self-consciousness was pejorative but especially if you're an actor and a public figure how you present which is more than just how you look is is very important she taught me that she taught me the importance of facing your fears otherwise you'll get soggy soggy she taught me that guys like Spencer Tracy and my father don't necessarily realize when they hurt you mmm she made it a point to teach me a lot and I think she did it so that after she died I'd keep talking about her you know after she won her fourth Academy Award and I did not win my third mm-hmm I called her up to congratulate her and her first words to me were you'll never catch me now know the salt of the earth that's funny it's also it's interesting as she was so not known for fashion or all of those things but that idea that she really thought image was important if you think about her life it was all about that image and she always had the same image and one of her fixations was never being shorter than the people she was with and when I did my first scene in on Golden Pond when I show up and I had high heels on she cut and then she disappeared for about minutes and when she came back she had heels on I love the smell of men who wear musky Cologne I could talk about Blanc for hours on end how different the development of boys is from the development of girls I can sum up my life in this bumper sticker I don't never give up never give up never give up thank you Jane Fonda thank you thanks for your time you

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Id: JHMHXOc6p4g

Length: 44min 3sec (2643 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 27 2018