The iconic director Jane Fonda couldn’t stand working with: “It wasn’t very fun”
Having faced pressure from the beginning of her career based largely on who her father was and what he’d accomplished as an actor, Jane Fonda quickly realised that playing the Hollywood game wasn’t something she had any interest in doing.
That instinct to resist expectations became a defining trait of Fonda’s career. Rather than conforming to the industry’s idea of what a leading actress should be, she consistently sought out roles that challenged both herself and her audience. It meant taking risks that didn’t always guarantee commercial success, but it also allowed her to build a body of work that was far more varied and substantial than many of her contemporaries.
The second-generation star had to fight hard to be taken seriously as more than just a pretty face, matters that didn’t get any easier when playing an intergalactic bombshell in Barbarella gave her a taste of mainstream success. Fonda had more than a dozen credits under her belt by the time the cult classic sci-fi was even released in 1968, but it was a role producers were instantly desperate to typecast her in.
Instead, Fonda sought to prove her dramatic chops and did just that when her first post-Barbarella performance in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? earned her a first Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Actress’. Underlining her undeniable talent, she won the ‘Best Actress’ prize for her second post-Barbarella picture, Klute.
Netting two Oscar nods and one victory in quick succession elevated Fonda towards the A-list, only for her outspoken political beliefs to cause significant blowback. There were plenty within the American industry who’d be happy to blackball the star after she continually ruffled some very powerful feathers, which encouraged her to head overseas.
At that point, stepping outside Hollywood wasn’t just a creative decision but a strategic one. European cinema offered a different kind of artistic freedom, often prioritising experimentation and political engagement over box office appeal. For an actor like Fonda, who was becoming increasingly outspoken and selective, it provided an environment where her interests could align more closely with the projects she chose to pursue.
The first film Fonda made after winning her Oscar was 1972’s international political drama Tout Va Bien, co-directed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin. Playing an American reporter among a cast of largely French and Italian co-stars, collaborating with one of cinema’s most influential auteurs was an opportunity she couldn’t resist.
It was quickly overshadowed by her off-camera antics, though, with the image of Fonda sitting on Vietnamese anti-aircraft guns that earned her the nickname of ‘Hanoi Jane’ making global headlines less than two months after Tout Va Bien had premiered. She enjoyed the experience, but as for the film’s co-director? Not so keen.
“We didn’t get on that well, which is pretty normal with Godard, I believe,” Fonda told Numero. “You can’t ignore the influence he’s had on modern cinema, though. I don’t regret it, but it wasn’t very fun. Having said that, I’d like to see the film again today. Afterwards, they made a short film addressed to me, Letter to Jane. A completely nonsensical thing.”
A 52-minute visual essay that finds Godard and Gorin narrating, deconstructing, analysing, and critiquing a single photo taken of Fonda in Vietnam, she’s not wrong in calling it a nonsensical artistic exercise. The two-time Oscar winner is even being polite about it, having gone on to describe the unofficial postscript to Tout Va Bien that saw two directors spend nearly an hour talking about a still image that sought to merge fact with fiction in a very French way as “a big pile of bullshit.”
