Joan Didion documentary explores her life as she became a ‘fully-formed famous writer’

Producer Annabelle Dunne on her new film, ‘Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold’

Ashley Nguyen
The Lily
6 min readOct 27, 2017

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(Julian Wasser/Netflix)

Annabelle Dunne’s family was always full of writers. Her great-uncles, Dominick and John Gregory Dunne, were journalists and authors.

Then, there was her great-aunt, Joan.

Joan was never the loudest voice in the room, according to her grandniece, Annabelle Dunne. She would never draw attention to herself. Joan always accompanied her husband, John, to family gatherings. Sometimes, the couple hosted. They were quite the pair, always together.

“She was really quite a devoted family member,” Annabelle Dunne, a 34-year-old film producer, said, “especially for people who were essentially her in-laws. She was really a part of the Dunne family.”

“Until I was old enough to know, I had no idea she was really famous. I didn’t know that she was one of the most successful writers.”

Annabelle Dunne’s great-aunt is, of course, Joan Didion, an iconic writer who has published countless essays and novels, including “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” “Play It As It Lays” and “The Year of Magical Thinking.”

She is also the subject of Dunne’s new film, “Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold,” which begins streaming on Netflix Oct. 27.

In the film, we get to see Didion, 82, sitting in her apartment, facing the camera, her hands moving around as she describes the past. We hear her talking to her nephew, director and actor Griffin Dunne, who sits mostly out of sight as he lightly prods Didion with questions. He produced the film alongside Annabelle Dunne and Mary Recine.

For people who are fans of Didion, seeing her on screen is truly a treat. Her writing is raw, as is she in the film. At times, she seems sad. At others, she seems giddy.

For those who have never read her work or know Didion only for her chic physical appearance — sunglasses, chin-length hair—the film offers an intimate portrait of an observant writer who was born in California and revels in a good story. They’ll hear her read excerpts from her work and meet a woman who has experienced great loss. (Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, died in 2003. Their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, died two years later.)

Annabelle Dunne. (Julia Bainbridge)

In a way, Annabelle Dunne also got to meet someone new while making “The Center Will Not Hold.” It allowed her to see a part of Didion’s life she hadn’t seen before.

“I was fascinated by the time in her life that pre-dates me, because I was born in the ’80s,” Annabelle Dunne said. “Getting this window into her early days at Vogue, her years at Berkeley, all these times before she met John, were fascinating to me.”

“That was great to hear about,” she added, “because by the time I came along, she was a fully-formed famous writer.”

In a conversation with The Lily, Annabelle Dunne talked about the filmmaking process, how social media changed and expanded her aunt’s fan base and Didion’s biggest critique of herself. Below are anecdotes from that discussion.

The importance of word count

After publishing “The Year of Magical Thinking” — which documents how Didion dealt with her husband’s sudden death — Didion decided to adapt the book for the stage. Playwright David Hare signed on to direct. An early hurdle? Didion needed to write the script, and she had never written a play.

“She apparently called him and said just one question, which was, ‘How many words does it need to be?’” Dunne said.

That portion of Hare’s interview ultimately ended up on the cutting room floor, but Dunne loved the anecdote.

“He’s one of the most celebrated directors and playwrights, but she didn’t burden him with explaining to her how to write a play,” she said. “She just needed to know the word count, and that’s how her mind works.”

Relationships as writing material

Didion and her husband left New York for California in 1964. They initially settled in Portuguese Bend, an area on the coast in Los Angeles County, before moving to a home on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood.

(Julian Wasser/Netflix)

In California, their careers took off and their family grew after the couple adopted their daughter, Quintana. They hosted parties that Janis Joplin attended. But eventually, as their surroundings began to unravel, the couple did too. Drugs were everywhere, and the Tate murders consumed and terrified the people around them. While vacationing with her family in Hawaii, Didion worked on an essay that ended up in Life magazine around 1969. One line is particularly famous:

“We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.”

Didion’s husband was her most-trusted reader. He edited the piece and eventually touched on their marriage in his memoir, “Vegas.” They stayed together until his death. Dunne wasn’t surprised that they went through dark times, she said, noting that “all couples go through ups and downs.”

“ I think the most surprising thing about it was how they treated it,” Dunne said. “They used it. That was their material.”

Didion’s ‘cult’ following

In 2015, Céline, a fashion label, used Didion in an ad campaign. Dunne started seeing her aunt’s image explode on social media.

“I was thinking, are people even aware that she wrote this collection of essays, these watershed pieces?” Dunne recalled. “We weren’t sure.”

“If you really want to get to know a writer, you have to read their work,” Dunne said. “You can’t just look at #JoanDidion and have a sense of who she is and what she stands for.”

Frailness and ice cream

Didion has always been petite. Although they make sure she’s healthy, her weight is something her family is accustomed to.

“She has looked the same for decades,” Dunne said. But when people saw some rough cuts of the documentary, they warned the filmmakers about how jarring her so-called frailness might seem to someone who does not know her.

“So we really tried to be thoughtful about the first images that you see of this person,” Dunne said. “You kind of create your rules for what the viewer’s going to see in a soft way.”

They shot images of her walking through her apartment in loose-fitting lounge clothes, glasses in hand. They show her making sandwiches and reading the paper at her kitchen table.

At one point in the film, her nephew looks in her refrigerator and says, “Look how much soup you have!” After a back and forth, she says, “It’s ice cream.”

Didion’s flaws

Dunne’s first documentary was a film about writer Nora Ephron called “Everything is Copy.” A producer for the film, Dunne worked on the project with Ephron’s son, Jacob Bernstein. (His father is journalist Carl Bernstein.) Ephron had cancer and died in 2012 before the documentary was made, but the filmmakers knew they would need people to go on camera to discuss her imperfections.

Didion with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and her daughter, Quintana Roo. (Julian Wasser/Netflix)

The same went for Didion in “The Center Will Not Hold.”

“I think we probably started out thinking that it was going to be a professional critique, but the biggest critique of Joan ultimately comes from Joan,” Dunne said.

“I think it’s about her role as a mother,” she continued. “I think she is incredibly hard on herself for what ended up happening to her daughter. And I think she has a lot of guilt about that, and for me that’s probably what comes through in the movie. What she views as her role in losing her daughter, which of course it’s not her fault. But she’s quite hard on herself as a mother.”

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