*”Love to Love You, Donna Summer,” the HBO documentary co-directed by the late singer’s daughter, Brooklyn Sudano,” and filmmaker Roger Ross Williams, is intended to be much more than a typical biography with industry experts weighing in.
“We didn’t want to make Behind the Music,” Williams told the outlet, Jezebel. “We could have interviewed tons of musicologists and experts… You could read an article about Donna Summer in Billboard or whatever. But this is something that you can’t get. This is the family, the insiders. This is from Donna. This is truly who she was as an artist and her journey—and deeply personal.”
“I think it’s very easy to fall into the trap of just being a Wikipedia page,” added Sudano. “But you’re seeing her in real-time. You’re seeing her perform. You’re seeing her greatness in action. And then [we] let the audience make the decision for themselves where they think she stands in kind of the lexicon of music history.”
The documentary, now airing/streaming, was envisioned by both directors as a retrospective of Summer. Williams said they divided the film into what he saw as the three phases of her life: The German years, where she began her career in a stage version of Hair, modeled, and began recording; her late-‘70s disco era; and her happiness in domestic life during the ‘80s, as she raised Sudano and her sisters, Mimi and Amanda. Williams told Jezebel the doc is “Donna’s journey—not so much about the musical journey, which you could do a multipart series [about], but it was really about where she was emotionally in her life.”
Sudano affirms that the film is not a chronological presentation of Summer’s hits. Rather, it flows freely through her iconic output, showing her creative process behind “Dim All the Lights,” “Bad Girls,” and “She Works Hard for the Money,” among others.
“I was really creating this collage, this very immersive experience that felt very grounded and very real and layered,” explained Sudano, an actor whose directorial debut is this project. “I don’t think you [usually] get that kind of approach, particularly for someone like my mom and that kind of music, and we really wanted to make it as personal and immersive as possible.”
Williams and Sudano do not shy away from the painful or controversial aspects of Summer’s career, including being sexually abused by a minister when she was a teen, and the backlash over comments she made about gays, including the derogatory phrase, “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”
Sudano told Jezebel that she was inspired to tell Summer’s story after her 2012 death from lung cancer. “It was really coming to terms with not having my mom,” said Sudano. “I had just become a mother and I was really processing what that role was like.”
She added that fans have flooded her with accounts of Summer’s impact on their lives.
“I just felt like there was a lot to be said that wasn’t said yet,” Sudano said.
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