My emotions are inappropriate to my size,” says Louise Bourgeois in The Spider, the Mistress, and the Tangerine, a documentary opening today at Film Forum. “It is not the emotions themselves, but their intensity — they are much too much for me to handle. That’s why I transfer the energy into sculpture.”

Bourgeois the person, now 96, is indeed small in stature, but Bourgeois the artist and grande dame can seem epic in proportion. The Spider, whose release coincides with the opening of a full traveling Bourgeois retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Musuem this week, presents a spitfire of a woman, a playful octo/nonagenarian dressed in hot pink faux fur, spouting off sassy one-liners about the meaning of life, and alternately captivating and repelling everyone around her. “She generates energy, and she generates psychological energy,” says curator Robert Storr, dean of Yale Art School. “She’s also a vampire. She sucks up psychological energy.”

Amei Wallach, a longtime art critic, commentator, and curator who’s written books about Bourgeois and Ilya Kabokov, among others, co-directed and co-produced the film with Marion Cajori, the director of biopics about Joan Mitchell and Chuck Close who succumbed to cancer in August 2006 at the age of 56. Together they clocked countless hours at Bourgeois’s Manhattan home and now-defunct Brooklyn studio between 1993 and 1998, photographed her work at home and abroad from 1992 to 2008, and conducted interviews with the likes of Storr, MoMA curator Deborah Wye, Louise’s son Jean-Louis Bourgeois, and her longtime assistant, Jerry Gorovoy.

The result is a broad overview of Bourgeois’s work and a penetrating look into her psyche, culminating in the sort of breakthrough — told over the eponymous tangerines — that we seldom see from even our most intimate acquaintances, let alone the artists we admire.

Wallach spoke to ARTINFO about the challenges and rewards of filming Bourgeois and of becoming a first-time filmmaker.

How did the film come about?

I’d been writing about Louise and doing the art commentary for the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, and she wanted to be on it. I told her I’d like to make a film, because she’s as good a character as Buñuel ever wrote. And she said sure. But I didn’t know how to make a film so I went to the people who were running the Art on Film program at the Metropolitan and they recommended Marion Cajori, whose film on Joan Mitchell had just come out. Marion had already been filming the work for a year, but she hadn’t been able to get access to Louise.

Do you feel confident as a filmmaker now?

Well, I’ve started my next film! It’s about Ilya and Emilia Kabokov. He’s having a huge four-venue show in Moscow in September, so we’re going to be filming there most of the summer.

What was the hardest thing for you in making the Bourgeois film, as a first-time filmmaker?

Learning how scenes go together to build a trajectory, not necessarily in a logical way at all, but in a way that is intuitively correct.

You filmed Louise for many years, and she aged in those years, but the sequence in the film does not necessarily correspond to the chronology.

We decided that it was more important to get deeper and deeper into her psyche. If we’d just been chronological it wouldn’t have gripped you in any way.

I’m assuming you didn’t plan for the project to take as long as it did.

No, it took that long because of fund-raising. The MoMA show was in 1982, but she still had no collectors by 1993, except some museums. We raised just enough money to film, but we often didn’t have enough to develop. So we just kept on shooting, which actually turned out to be a great thing.

How did you know you were done?

We continued shooting until there came a point where we didn’t want to do it to Louise anymore.

What was your shooting schedule like? How often did you see Louise?

Well, that first summer we had these elaborate shoots in the studio – around four of them. After that, Marion would take a high 8 camera and we’d go every few months and talk to her. We have loads of footage we didn’t use.

Are there particular scenes that you wish had made it in?

There was a scene of Rob Storr taking a group around her studio, and her ducking in and out. There are scenes of her playing with materials.

Since you mention Robert Storr, he said in the film that Louise can be extremely difficult, and rather hurtful.

Ha! Well, her subconscious is so close to the surface that anything will spark it. She could be quite difficult, but on the other hand, she could be so accessible and intimate. Jerry says it comes from fear, and I think that’s true. She’s afraid she’ll come off wrong, she’s afraid she’ll say the wrong thing, she’s afraid you won’t understand her. And she reacts quite sharply. But I think she came to trust us, and that was a huge thing.

I can’t imagine that tangerine scene could have happened if she didn’t.

I have to admit, that was not our scene. That was a scene that Jerry hired somebody to shoot, and he gave it to us. We didn’t shoot it, but we cut it in such a way that it’s seamless, so it’s as moving as it could possibly be.

We wanted it to be the climax of the film, and for everything to lead to that. At one point when Marion and I were editing the film, we started with it, which was totally the wrong thing to do. It had to be the climax.

There’s also a scene where Louise yells at you. Did you debate whether to include that?

Because Louise is so open about how difficult she is, we thought it was fine to put that in there. We needed an example of the kind of thing Rob was talking about.  

Was it difficult to watch her get so emotional and not intervene?

Well, I had been writing about her, so I had seen it before. On the one hand, she performs for the camera. That’s pretty obvious, right? On the other hand, it’s so accessible and real. It’s a very funny combination, and it’s a little tension-making, because you’re not getting what you want. But what I’ve learned from this film is that you might think you know what you want, but what you get is what you actually want.  

Do you think the film is how Marion envisioned it?

At the first screening, I said, “This is not the film Marion would have made” — I was so intent on the dramatic arc, and on the emotionality of it, whereas Marion loved to find the intellectual and aesthetic and emotional core. That would have been an incredible film, just not the film that we made. But Isabel Jay, Marion’s daughter, who’s in her early 20s, got up and said, “Yes, but my mother would have been very proud of it.”

Are you still in touch with Louise?

I go to see her from time to time.

Is she well?

She’s very well. She’s 96 years old, and she’s always drawing and making prints.

Has she seen the film?

You know, everybody asks me that, so finally I sent an email to Jerry yesterday, because I’ve never brought it up with her. He wrote and said she has seen the film, enjoyed it, and got a laugh out of some of the older footage.

Will she be going to the Guggenheim for the show?

No, no. She hasn’t left her house in 10, 12 years.

Louise seems so generous with her ideas about life and how to live it. I’m wondering what you took away from your time with her.

What I took from her is not to be afraid of where things come from, and not to be afraid to try things. And she’s also the one who said — I think it was paraphrasing the song — you don’t always get what you want, you get what you need. She had a very complex, hard life in many ways, but look what she made of it.