At this late date, what the Pretenders accomplished is no mystery achievement. But it’s also a story that has never been extensively chronicled on film until “The Pretenders,” a Joss Crowley-directed doc that premieres Sunday at the Toronto International Film Festival. The band released what might rightly be considered the best rock ‘n’ roll debut album of all time in Janauary 1980, and Crowley’s film covers the lead-up to that — Chrissie Hynde looking and acting like a biker chick in late ’70s Akron before moving to and finding her real gang in the U.K. — and the tumultuous few years that followed, with further masterpieces arriving alongside band dismisals and deaths.
Although the focus is on the original lineup and the first five years, it brings us into the present day of Hynde, still one of the greatest to ever pick up a guitar. As delightfully plain-spoken as Hynde is when you get her to sit down and talk, she can be to get into that chair, as a naturally camera-shy personality, so Crowley’s film is particularly useful in further immortalizing a subject who never wanted to be anything more than an ordinary musician, whether “rock goddess” was quickly and eternally thrust upon her or not. Variety spoke with Crowley and the delightfully tart-as-ever Hynde in advance of the Toronto premiere.
Most of the time with modern music documentaries, it’s the artist or their company instigating the doc, and usually co-producing it. But it sounds like that’s not necessarily what happened this time because, Joss, you’ve talked about the difficulty in talking Chrissie into it. Joss Crowley: I’ve been trying to work with Chrissie and tell the Pretenders’ story for over 10 years, and kept knocking at the door; didn’t get an answer.
It was just a question of right time, right place, and Chrissie came round to the idea of meeting me. We sat down and talked about some of the docs I’ve made, and about other things, trying to find some mutual interests. I wasn’t really sure when I left that meeting how it had gone, but within about a week, we sat down and recorded our first interview, at the end of 2023.
Chrissie, you needed less than a week to think about it and get underway after that first meeting? Chrissie Hynde: Well, we had to have a go and see how it would go, and I think I must have laid down some sort of ground rules, so I was willing to go into it — that it would be (visually focused on) archive footage, and really talk about the band and not focus too much on me, and it wouldn’t be about “women in rock” or any of that kind of thing. It would just be a story of the band.
I was kind of keen to have it done because, as we all know, there’s documentaries on everything and everyone now. And in fact, someone else had already made a documentary on the Pretenders, which had nothing to do with me or my entire organization. I was starting to get calls from some of my old friends saying, “Oh, I’m gonna do your documentary on Tuesday.” And I’d be like, “We’re not doing a documentary!” This other team had gone in to people I know and made it sound like it was an official documentary.
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