Her work ethic and her ability to constantly forge ahead was pretty astounding.
Honestly, she never saw anything different. She first saw all the women around her working, and they were the stars and breadwinners. That was the reason she probably was able to keep going—because she didn’t have to invent the idea on her own. It was something her mother and sisters very much did. And her father was also a big piece of it. He was extraordinarily bright, a self-taught engineer, and he played classical music all the time. John Carter Cash [June and Johnny’s son] showed me his grandfather’s books in his library, and there was one that stuck out to me from the late 1800s called: What Can a Woman Do. It was a radical feminist work written by this woman who started the first journalism school in Ohio. And she basically goes through every profession and said, yes, women can do this—they could be beekeepers, doctors, tailors—emphasizing how important it was for women to make their own money. That was probably June’s father’s manual for raising three girls.
June’s son, John, shared so many incredible details about his parents’ lives.
From the beginning, I was fortunate that Carlene Carter and John Carter wanted to tell the full story. And they were not afraid to go to some of these darker places.
We hear more detail about the art of her relationship with Johnny and the challenges in their marriage, which Rosanne Cash in the film says had an almost mythical quality for people. Did you want to peel back some of those layers?
With so many stories about romance, we see that the main struggle is for people to get together. And that’s how Walk the Line ends basically. And if we’re talking about a marriage, that’s the easy part; that isn’t the story. And these more complex stories, like theirs, are so much more interesting. And it wasn’t like June saved him and it was over; they struggled, and they worked so hard for years, and it was never a done deal. They had a very true and deep love, but their relationship was kind of a full circle, and they were both willing to put in a lot of work and forgive and get over the mistakes. I think that’s a far more compelling story than “happily ever after.”