“While I Knew the Music Inside Out There Was So Much I Didn’t Know About the Story Behind the Album”: Alison Klayman on Jagged

As perhaps one of the few people on the planet who managed to nightclub through the ’90s without any awareness of shooting star Alanis Morissette (her music just didn’t penetrate my punk/goth/new wave bubble) I came to Alison Klayman’s latest doc Jagged, part of HBO’s new Music Box series, with a positively clean slate. The film is an in-depth look at the Canadian-American musician-singer-songwriter-actress through an exhaustive amount of archival material, juxtaposed with straightforward interviews with the mercurial Morissette herself. (For those also in a Morissette-defying bubble, this would be a good time to state that the musician is not all that thrilled with the final product – something I find truly perplexing. My big takeaway from Jagged? Morissette is shockingly down-to-earth normal for a global rock star.) Prior to the film’s HBO debut on November 18 (it received its U.S. premiere at DOC NYC after world premiering at Toronto) Filmmaker reached out to Klayman to learn more about Jagged; and how she got from Ai Weiwei (2012’s Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry), to Steve Bannon (2019’s The Brink – which really should be required viewing for Errol Morris on how not to get played), to the feminist force behind 1995’s industry-upending album “Jagged Little Pill.”

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.