You know the score. We all do. Diane Warren has been nominated for Best Original Song at the Oscars 15 times. She’s never won, although she does have the only Academy Honorary Award ever given to a songwriter. Still, she really wants to win a competitive award.
Every year she has a new song in the running. For the past eight years in a row, that new song has been nominated.
She goes to lots of awards-season events, even though she’s not the partying type. “It forces me to be social,” she said. “I tend to sit in my room and write my songs.”
We know this, too: If she ever does break through and win that competitive Oscar, she’ll be back the following year with another song. “I think that’s in my blood,” she admitted. “I’ll just keep going. I love the whole thing.”
That’s one of the themes of “Diane Warren: Relentless,” a documentary by Bess Kargman. But it’s not just a doc about Warren; it’s also the movie that contains “Dear Me,” the song that is her latest hope for an Oscar.
The difference between “Dear Me” and her other nominated songs is that it’s directly and explicitly about her. She usually sits down and thinks about the characters and themes of a movie before she writes a song, but this time the character is her and the theme is “What is Diane Warren really like?”
“It was like, ‘Oh, wow, this is a movie about me,’” she said. “I had to think about what song would be authentic to my story.” Her answer was to write a musical letter to the young Diane, a driven but unhappy teenager who lived in the San Fernando Valley and wanted to write songs, but who got little support from her emotionally distant mother.
“I wanted to write a song to that kid who felt like nobody understood her,” she said. “I was bullied, and it was hard for me. I was kind of a juvenile delinquent and I really felt misunderstood and thought the world was against me. I wanted to write a song to her, you know?”
She cried when she wrote “Dear Me,” but now she’s finding that the song she thought was her most personal might also be her most universal. “We all start out as messed-up versions of ourselves,” she said, “and if we could, we’d all like to talk to that version of ourselves and say, ‘It’ll be OK.’”
But what if 14-year-old Diane got that letter or heard that song from her sixtysomething self? What would she say or do?
“She probably would have told me to f— off,” she said immediately, laughing. “I was an angry kid.”
A pause. “Or maybe not. Maybe I would have listened, but at that time I didn’t listen to a lot of people. I was kind of in my own world.”
She thought about it a little more. “That’s a good question. If I was smart, I would have listened to her. But I don’t know how smart I was at 14. I would have told her to f–k off.”
That youthful defiance and hurt comes across in “Relentless,” in which Warren’s friend, record producer David Foster, essentially says that there’s a deep-seated darkness and pain in her that keeps her from truly enjoying her success. She didn’t dispute his quote. “I think he’s right,” she said. “It’s hard for me to really relax. I never sit back and go, ‘I’m OK, I’m great.’ I’m always on to the next thing, and I have to keep creating. It’s what keeps me alive.”
She grinned. “David goes on his private jets and all that stuff, or on a yacht. What the f–k would I do on a yacht? If I go to the beach with friends, I’m there for 10 minutes, and then I’m like, ‘OK, either we gotta do something or I’m going to work.’”
In other words: See you next year, Diane.
This story first appeared in the Race Begins issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
The post Diane Warren Wrote a Song to Her 14-Year-Old Self – Who, If She’d Heard It, ‘Would Have Told Me to F–k Off’ appeared first on TheWrap.
