Here's How Alanis Morissette Really Feels About The Jagged Documentary
Alanis Morissette raged onto the national stage in 1995 at the age of 21 with her brutally honest and unflinching lyrics on her 1995 top charting album, "Jagged Little Pill," hitting a nerve with mass audiences and selling 10 million copies in 1996 and 20 million more since, according to The New York Times. In the mid-'90s, Morissette's songs like "Ironic," "You Oughta Know," and "Hand in my Pocket" were all over the radio. As The New York Times reported, for context, Radiohead was her opening act in 1996.
Morissette and "Jagged Little Pill" were huge, but she has yet to make another album that saw that level of success. Still, she had made her mark, so much so that a documentary called "Jagged" was recently made about Morissette's life up to the point where she wrote "Jagged Little Pill." The film looks at what it was like to find that kind of success at just 21 years old.
The film debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 14 and is set to air on HBO on November 19, per the Los Angeles Times, but Morissette issued a recent statement telling the world, "This is not the story I agreed to tell." According to her full statement posted on Deadline, she said she agreed to be part of the documentary thinking it was a celebration of the 25th anniversary of "Jagged Little Pill," but when she saw the film prior to the film festival screening, she was not feeling it. At all.
Morissette said the filmmakers had a 'salacious agenda'
Morissette said in the statement that she was "lulled into a false sense of security and their salacious agenda became apparent immediately upon my seeing the first cut of the film. This is when I knew our visions were in fact painfully diverged."
It's hard to say what's in the film versus what she thought was going to be in the film — or what she wanted to include or leave out, but The Washington Post reported that Morissette said in the documentary that at age 15 she had sex with five different men, and later realized it was statutory rape. At that time she was a pop and TV star in Canada.
Morissette said in her statement about "Jagged" that she trusted "someone who did not warrant being trusted," possibly the film's director, Alison Klayman. Morissette said that the documentary "includes implications and facts that are simply not true. While there is beauty and some elements of accuracy in this/my story to be sure — I ultimately won't be supporting someone else's reductive take on a story much too nuanced for them to ever grasp or tell."
Regarding Morissette's reaction to the documentary, Klayman told Deadline, "It's a really hard thing to see a movie made about yourself and I think she's incredibly brave and her reaction when she saw it was that it was a really — she could feel all the work, all the nuance that went into it."