Whitney: Can I Be Me Shows The Whitney Houston You Never Knew

There are two particularly telling moments in Whitney: Can I Be Me, an absorbing new documentary about the late singer Whitney Houston that premieres on Showtime tomorrow (it’s currently in limited theaters in New York and Los Angeles). The first is a clip from a 1986 French talk show. Houston sits in a chair between the host and the French singer Serge Gainsbourg. “I want to fuck her,” Gainsbourg announces in thickly accented English, gesturing to Houston. “He says you are great! “ the host, panicking, translates. The two men go back and forth in French as Houston’s face registers shock, amusement, irritation, a tinge of disgust. Then she regains her poise. Gainsbourg grabs her by the chin. “You are the best of the best, madam,” he says. “Thank you,” she replies, gently prying his fingers from her perfectly composed face. “Thank you.”

The second moment is a bit of camcorder footage from 1999. The singer, wearing a gigantic Cat in the Hat tee shirt, and her husband Bobby Brown, clad in denim overalls, cavort around a hotel room like kids. At one point they act out a scene from What’s Love Got To Do With It, the 1993 biopic about Ike and Tina Turner (particularly eerie, given the parallels that would eventually emerge between the two relationships). He, jokingly, gets in her face. She, laughing, threatens him with a butter knife. He does the Karate Kid stork move. They giggle some more. “This is what Tina didn’t do,” a woman in the background says. Later the three survey the spread of food they’ve ordered: pizza, chicken wings. Houston nestles into the couch, watches an action movie, claps with delight.

Whitney: Can I Be Me is co-directed by the British filmmaker Nick Broomfield (Kurt and Courtney) and the Austrian filmmaker Rudi Dolezal (Freddie Mercury, the Untold Story). Their title derives from Houston’s favorite saying: “Can I be me?” means, essentially, “Can I stop being her?” Any story about Houston is a story of two Whitneys. There’s the young woman molded by Arista Records founder Clive Davis into the black pop princess white America didn’t know it wanted, the pioneer who paved the way for Beyonce, the powerhouse performer with more consecutive Number 1 hits than the Beatles, the superstar so polished and patrician that she could gracefully deflect even the most vulgar attention from even the most powerful men. And then there’s the other Whitney: goofy, off-kilter, sometimes out-of-control, with complicated family relationships and even more complicated romantic ones, and with a weakness for drugs that would eventually be her undoing.

It’s that Whitney Houston we get a glimpse of in the camcorder video described above, filmed thirteen years before the singer was found dead in her Los Angeles hotel bathtub (cause of death: heart disease, cocaine and drowning) and a year before, her voice in tatters, Houston was sent home from a disastrous Oscars rehearsal, a moment that made evident the substance abuse she’d long struggled to keep quiet. The video comes from a cache of material shot by Dolezal when he accompanied the singer, then at the height of her fame, on her 1999 world tour. He was intending to make a film, but when that project fell through, he shelved the footage. There it remained until Broomfield suggested collaborating on a documentary.

Their film repurposes what Dolezal shot, and splices that footage alongside new interviews with Houston’s musical collaborators, her bodyguard, and her friends, for a (literally) backstage look at the singer's life, and at her troubled relationships: with Brown, widely regarded as a bad influence; with her controlling gospel singer mother, Cissy Houston; with her long-time confidante, creative director and possible lesbian lover Robyn Crawford. It's a remarkably intimate film, and one that raises nearly as many questions as it answers.

I spoke to Dolezal by phone about some of those questions—"there comes a point where enough is enough," he tells me—and about his very long path to finally releasing a documentary about Whitney Houston.

How did you first meet Whitney Houston?

In 1985, when her first album was released. At the time I was doing a television program where I interviewed all the important pop stars. I met her in Montreaux, Switzerland and thought, oh my god, what a nice, neat, well-educated young woman. She made the impression of never having been near alcohol, cigarettes, anything else. Very shy.

How did you end up on tour with her in 1999?

I’ve done something like 3500 music videos, for the Rolling Stones, Queen, what have you. Clive Davis called me one day in 1999 and said, Rudi, I have a problem. Whitney just won an award from BET, entertainer of the decade, but the day before the award ceremony, she actually starts her world tour in Mannheim, Germany. I want you to go there and film her. He wanted to have a message recorded from Whitney doing the usual thing: “I’m so sorry I can’t be with you, but I dedicate my next song.”

So I film this statement on stage and this one song in Mannheim, Germany, which brought Whitney and Robyn Crawford the next day into my editing suite in Vienna, Austria. They had to approve it so we could send it to the states. So they’re sitting in my editing room on a rainy Sunday afternoon. The whole thing took five minutes. Whitney said, what else can we do? Our flight back to Germany is in four hours. I said, I’ve just finished a documentary about Freddie Mercury. So she looks through that 100 minute documentary, and says do you have anything else? From a year before, I had a documentary about the Rolling stones in Argentina. When we were halfway through the Stones, she said, stop stop stop! Rudi, I want you to do a film like this about me!

The next day I explained, Whitney, there’s one more thing. Queen and the Stones, they let me film everything. I’m a documentary filmmaker. I wanted to see Mick Jagger’s eyes when he’s nervous before he goes out and plays in front of 80,000 people. I filmed Freddie Mercury when he was rehearsing in his dressing room with nobody’s present. She said, ok, Rudi, and she took a backstage pass and wrote on it: For Rudi, anywhere he wants to go. That was my backstage pass for the whole tour.

Was there ever any moment when she asked you to turn the camera off?

Actually not. I was super surprised. Robyn Crawford was very instrumental. She understood from the very beginning that this was a big chance to rewrite who is Whitney, to bring across that Whitney Houston is not only a diva, a beautiful woman, one of the greatest singers in the world. But also a human being. Without Robyn a lot of these things would never have been filmed.

This was the most access I ever had, from a person who was at the time portrayed to be either very shy, or a diva. Both things were true and not true. The truth was in the middle. Whitney was always on time. I never remember that she blew a shoot. She was always nice to everybody, the crew, the sound guy. She was like one of us.

Did you ever, in your time spent filming Whitney, see her taking drugs?

I had no idea she was taking drugs. I never saw anybody taking cocaine. Yes, I saw a lot of people smoking weed. But I was not aware of anything like crack cocaine.

I was very happy at the end of filming, at the end of the tour. We arranged that I would come to Newark, New Jersey, where she had a big house, to look through footage and decide whether we wanted to do a tour documentary or a documentary about her entire career. Then the thing with the Academy Awards happened, Burt Bacharach, [the show’s musical director], sent her home. Suddenly the whole story changed. Suddenly Whitney Houston was a big drug addict. I said, we can’t release a tour documentary where we don’t even talk about drugs! She was in complete denial. There was no way to persuade her. I wanted to do another five to ten minute interview, where she would say something in the neighborhood of: yes, I have a substance problem, I’m working on it. Full stop. The fans would have loved it. She said, I can’t say I have a substance problem. I was reminded of Freddie Mercury, who could never say he was gay. In the ‘80s at Queen parties he was always having a so-called girlfriend that he’d enter the party with for all the tabloids and the photo opportunity. I was reminded of his complete denial.

So I said, this is not going to be released. We had various attempts with the Houston family and Sony, the record company, to release it at later stages. But I took the privilege to say no. And then Whitney passed.

Did you and Whitney lose touch over the years?

No, we met. We had meetings. I saw her in her home. We were in touch, and I was also in touch with her family. Everybody knew I had this footage. Then Whitney passes, and the next day my phone doesn’t stop ringing. Clive Davis is on the phone, and I said, Clive, I’m not selling, I’m not an agency. Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Studios is on the phone. Sony is on the phone. There was a lot of money on the table. I said if I wanted to sell that footage, I would have done it a year after I filmed it. Even if Whitney’s not with us anymore, I don’t forget the moment in that editing room when she said, I want you to do a film like this about me.

The reason I did it with Nick Broomfield was very simple. He said why don’t we do a film together. Nick Broomfield is a legendary documentary filmmaker. It was an honor for me to be asked. He’s only ten years older than I am, but I’m the junior in the game. I said, ok, with Nick I can be true to what I promised Whitney. It’s very difficult for two directors to work together. We managed, and I’m more than happy with what came out of it. Nick had the outside view I couldn’t have. I had the inside view. I think the combination in the end is quite interesting.

When you agreed to make the film, what did you tell Nick had to come across about Whitney?

I said I have only one guideline. I’m for telling everything as it was, but on the other hand, when the people go out of the cinema, or are finished with the film, they still must love Whitney Houston, we are not allowed to destroy her. We can piss on the monument, but only a little. At the end the monument still has to stand.

Bobby Brown was also on that 1999 tour. The film doesn’t blame him for Whitney’s downfall, but it acknowledges some ambiguity about his place in her life: was he loyal, or was he a cheater? Even if Whitney’s drug use predated her relationship with Bobby, did he make it harder for her to get clean? What was your take?

That Bobby Brown came into the picture and then everything got bad is a fairy tale. It’s the same stupid explanation as Yoko Ono split up the Beatles. Bobby Brown was a specialist in alcohol and Whitney was a specialist in substances. He taught her how to drink heavily, she taught him how to use substances. Even that is too simple, because it always takes two. But what I have witnessed is that Bobby and Whitney really loved each other. That was a deep love, and whenever I was present, I could witness that. It was not a music business thing.

On the other hand, I saw what Bobby was doing with other women on the tour. Everybody saw it. Whitney saw it. And when one of the two was trying to get away from their demons, the other one was not really the best advocate.

You interviewed Cissy Houston in 2012, footage that’s in the film. What was your impression of their relationship?

I have never seen a person so cold as Cissy Houston. I was shivering. Cissy Houston was a great singer, but I always had the feeling that she was jealous about her own daughter. Whitney had the success that Cissy wanted to have. And that’s not a good basis for a mother daughter relationship.

It’s been nearly twenty years since Whitney's refusal to admit to her substance abuse problem forced you to abandon your original documentary. Given that, it seems particularly sad that now, her drug use is one of the main things we remember about her.

I think the major thing we have to remember about her is that she was the greatest singer on Earth. Nobody sang the National Anthem better than her. We have to remember that she had the best voice ever. Full stop. There are three people in the world you can say are icons of female pop music. One is Whitney Houston. One is Ella Fitzgerald. And the third one is up to you.

This interview has been condensed and edited.