‘Mary Oliver’ Documentary Director Sasha Waters Interview

For much of her adult life, poet Mary Oliver pursued her métier in relative obscurity, publishing well respected if modestly selling volumes of her work. Then, in 1984, she won the Pulitzer Prize, and that changed everything.

Oliver in her last three decades became a rare celebrity poet – beloved of cultural icons like Oprah Winfrey and Stephen Colbert, and a big draw on the speaking circuit where she read from her poems, like “Wild Geese” and “The Summer Day” (oft-quoted for its line “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”).

The new documentary Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World, directed by Sasha Waters, follows the unlikely arc of the poet’s life and career – from a childhood in which she suffered abuse to her time in Provincetown, MA, where she scraped out a living with her life partner Molly Malone Cook. The film opened theatrically in New York and is now playing in Los Angeles, expanding to other cities soon through Kino Lorber.

Waters joins the latest edition of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast, exploring how she solved the conundrum of making a film about a writer – never an easy task given the solitary nature of the craft. She also tells us how she enlisted Colbert, Helena Bonham Carter, Steve Buscemi and others to read from Oliver’s poems (Colbert is overcome with emotion trying to recite lines from “The Summer Day”).

Waters also explains why another Waters – taboo-breaking filmmaker John Waters (no relation to Sasha) – plays such an important role in the documentary. Oliver loved nature and drew inspiration and insights from it; John Waters, well, he thought of nature as full of wild creatures out to kill him.

The director also explains the meaning of the subtitle of her film, Saved by the Beauty of the World, derived from words spoken by the poet.

That’s on the new episode of Doc Talk hosted by John Ridley (12 Years a Slave, Shirley) and Matt Carey, Deadline’s senior documentary editor. The pod is a production of Deadline and Ridley’s Nō Studios.

Listen to the episode above or on major podcast platforms including Spotify, iHeart and Apple.