Rashida Jones Talks Working With Her Father as Her Documentary Subject in ‘Quincy’

“Anybody who’s ever loved him shares him with the world, and that’s part of loving him,” Rashida Jones told the Documentary Roundtable of her father, Quincy Jones, who is the subject of her documentary, Quincy.

“The reason I wanted to make this is because he is well documented, there’s actually really extensive pieces on him, but he’s so accomplished that you never get to actually spend time with him in any of those pieces because you have to cover the decades of success that he’s actually had,” Jones said of her music-mogul father. “But what they’ve missed is the reason he’s had that success.”

“Who he is in his private life and who he is when he connects with people is precisely the thing that incites his success,” Jones said, also noting her father’s work ethic and talent as pieces to the formula that has sent him into living-legend status.

When it came to shooting the film and asking Quincy to open up to the cameras, the director said, “He actually loved it,” except when it came to getting mic’d up every day, “He hated that,” she said.

“He also said, ‘I don’t want to see anything until you’re done,'” Jones told the roundtable, much to her relief as a filmmaker. “The complications with knowing your subject is that they’re going to have some sort of micro-managing control over the story you tell, and he did not do that at all, and that’s probably the only reason I did it.”

Related Stories

Related Story

"Trust Is the Coin of the Realm": The Documentary Roundtable