'Jane' latest film from Cobain, Stones director, and it's (surprisingly) centered around music, too

Brett Morgen has a reputation as a premier music documentary filmmaker.

He’s won acclaim for his documentaries on Kurt Cobain (“Cobain: Montage of Heck”), the Rolling Stones (“Crossfire Hurricane”), and jazz, blues and R&B (“Say It Loud: A Celebration of Black Music in America”).

He’s also directed other important documentaries on producer Robert Evans (“The Kid Stays in the Picture”) and the organizers of the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention protests (“The Chicago 10”).

So Morgen wasn’t looking to do a documentary on an octogenarian who had spent much of her adult life studying chimpanzees in Tanzania.

Then National Geographic sent him 150 hours of 16mm footage of Jane Goodall left over from its other documentaries of Goodall. That sparked an idea and suddenly Morgen was in. He wrote and directed “Jane,” which has two screenings this weekend in the Palm Springs International Film Festival.

MORE: 'Walking Dead' producer makes 'Mankiller'

“I thought it would be interesting to go outside the specter of rock and roll for a moment or two,” Morgen said in a telephone interview. “I was not pursuing anything at the moment. They called and proceeded to send me some footage, and I realized this was an opportunity of a lifetime.”

Goodall initially wasn’t interested in another documentary about herself. She claimed the first National Geographic film about her, “Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees,” was “so inaccurate, it just wasn’t true.”

But National Geographic promised she’d only have to do two days of interviews, so she let Morgen ask her some questions.

“I really think she didn’t think there was going to be anything left to do with this old, extra material,” said Morgen, “so it really wouldn’t be worth her time to get involved. However, if you’ve noticed, Jane has been on the road almost non-stop the last six months promoting the film.”

What turned this project from a potential rehash into a work of art that inspired Goodall was Morgen’s idea to use the footage as the basis for a "cinematic opera,” with the music illustrating Goodall’s romantic perception of nature and its inhabitants.

He immediately approached Philip Glass, the man credited with developing the minimalist genre of classical music in such works as the opera, “Einstein on the Beach,” and the opening number for the 1984 Olympic Games, “The Olympian: Lighting of the Torch and Closing” for chorus and orchestra.

“He’s the single greatest American composer,” Morgen said. “So, if you want a film to be conceived as a cinematic opera, Philip Glass is a great guy to speak to. This wasn’t a movie where the score came secondary. We hired him before we hired anyone else for the film and told him at that moment we wanted him to do 90 minutes of wall-to-wall music and to build this kind of operatic effect. I think that he delivered in spades.”

Starting with such fragmentary material, Morgen has created classic drama and a sense of fantasy out of pure imagination. He establishes obstacles for Goodall to overcome by showing her as a young woman living her idyllic dream of being at one with nature and then fearing that her dream may be lost because the chimpanzees won’t come out of hiding. When she makes contact and begins interacting with them after several months, there is a sense of wonder heightened by Glass’s subtly growing music.

MORE: Burt Reynolds stars in Closing Night Film

Goodall’s interviews aren’t used in sterile question-and-answer form, but are layered over the images to express Goodall’s emotional response to the Gombe Tanzanian forest, her scientific breakthroughs and the evolution of her private life. Her mother is sent to accompany her and we see what a remarkably progressive woman she is as she nurtures her daughter’s dreams. Then National Geographic sends a wildlife photographer, Dutch baron Hugo van Lawick,  to document Goodall’s work and they fall in love, get married and have a child.

When van Lawick is given another assignment apart from Goodall, the documentary gets another conflict to resolve. The film then goes from the story of a woman stepping into a man's world, by early 1960s standards, to the story of a woman torn between her work and her man.

“I definitely was aware that we were making a story about female empowerment,” Morgen said, “about a woman who had to overcome the structural opposition of her time. We were also telling a story about passion – Jane’s passion for her endeavors, as well as Hugo’s passions for his endeavors. It’s a love story, but not in the traditional girl-boy thing. It’s ultimately a love story about a woman and her work and a man and his work. I think all those themes, coupled with this idea of the film being sort of a modern-day cinematic opera, was something we were very aware of.”

Goodall was sent to Gombe without any scientific training by Kenyan archaeologist Louis Leakey, and we see her discover chimpanzees creating tools to help them gather food. Previously, it was thought that only humans were capable of inventing tools.

Morgen credits Goodall (who went on to earn a Ph.D. in ethology from Cambridge) with being able to communicate the magic of her experience, as effectively as Evans carried “The Kid Stays in the Picture” with his story-telling skills.

“Bob is one of the few people who can tell a story better than anyone, and that’s true of Jane Goodall, too,” said Morgen. “She has lived a totally extraordinary life and has this unique ability to write about it and articulate it. Without that, there is no film, ‘Jane.’ In fact, without that ability to communicate, we wouldn’t be talking about Jane Goodall. I think that was the unique gift I inherited with Jane. She’s a prolific writer and orator, and both of those ended up becoming quite useful for me in the construction of the film.”

But Morgen wasn’t just handed the materials for this film. He mapped out his story after viewing the 150 hours of footage and then added what he needed to realize his vision. He ended up with 800 to 1,000 hours of footage before starting to edit.

“I’ve been writing documentary screenplays for 17 years,” said Morgen. “My process is, I read whatever books are available about a subject and then I begin to screen through all the material that exists on a subject. At that point, I determine what is the best story that can be told using the materials that are available to us and, if we’re lacking any materials, what do we need to do to create the visuals and how can we interweave that organically? That’s my process.”

“Jane,” which is on the Shortlist for an Academy Award for Best Documentary, screens at 1 p.m. Saturday at the Camelot and 2:30 p.m. Sunday at the Regal Cinemas.