The Long and Winding Road to LOVE

An interview with ALL TOGETHER NOW director, Adrian Wills


Ordinarily, when two fervent forces embark on a collaboration, the results tend to be frighteningly intense. It seems that it could be either a catastrophe of epic proportions or a symbiotic melding that inspires all who witness it first hand. Given the drastic difference in potential results, most tend to avoid even entertaining the notion. We all know what happens when no risks are ever taken though. Besides, if we never risk the potential disaster, then we may never fall in love.

LOVE is exactly what the Cirque de Soleil found when they joined forces with the Apple company to bring the music of the Beatles to spectacularly new heights. It couldn’t have been an easy process to have too notoriously controlling and immensely huge entities find a way to do business together but find one they did and Adrian Wills was there to watch it all go down. His new documentary, ALL TOGETHER NOW, chronicles the entire experience – from the beautiful finished moments of the popular Vegas show to the ugly moments behind the scenes where it all seemed it would fall apart.

ALL TOGETHER NOW may not be a substitute for seeing the show itself but it is a tender experience for any Beatles fan. As though he weren’t even trying, Wills manages to get some very candid and very intimate moments with people I’m sure he never even dreamed he’d be speaking with – from Paul McCartney to George Martin to Yoko Ono. The closeness Wills fosters makes for a compelling and entertaining backstage look at this phenomenal show and also allows for the most important thing about the show to shine through – the love.

I caught up with Wills on the phone while he was in Montreal, a city he still calls home, promoting the film at the Festival Nouveau Cinema before the film’s American DVD release on October 21.


Joseph Belanger: Congratulations, first of all. The audience ate up your film at yesterday’s screening. You’re no stranger to the Cirque de Soleil but how was the LOVE project different from your previous Cirque work?
Adrian Wills: Thanks a lot. I’m glad to hear that. [Note: Wills could not make the screening as he was ill.] Well, the LOVE project is different in the sense that it was never supposed to be a film to begin with. I was just supposed to come in and shoot some stuff. They thought maybe it would be NBC or BBC that would so something. It wasn’t like, “Hey, Adrian. Here’s this great project. Go to town. We’ll give you all of our support.” It was more like a marathon all the way through. Eventually NBC and the BBC fell out but I had been shooting the whole time. So we just went with it.

JB: And did you have full access to every aspect of the production?
AW: It looks like we had all the time and all the money in the world but it wasn’t the case at all. I think it worked out to maybe 30 shooting days, maybe less. We had to really pick when we would be there. Because I was interviewing all these people myself as well, some of the shooting days would be about getting as many interviews as possible. From the interviews, I knew there was this emotional arch that could run throughout the film so that’s what we tried to set up.

JB: Were you a fan of the Beatles before you started working on this project?
AW: Oh yeah. I’ve been a fan of music for a long time. I was the kind of kid who would listen to radio shows and then tape everything. I have loved music ever since I can remember and the Beatles, I remember reading about them when I was 10 and listening to them all through my life.

JB: The man who staged the LOVE show, Dominic Champagne, describes at one point in ALL TOGETHER NOW that all the location research in London – Abbey Road, Strawberry Fields – was like being on some sort of pilgrimage. What was that experience like for you?
AW: It was like there were two parts of me. There was Adrian, the filmmaker, and then there was this other Adrian that was so taken with how amazing it all was. Then there’s the filmmaker part who reminds you what your job is and what you really want to do while you’re there; you’ve got to make sure you’re getting all the shots necessary to tell the story later. I felt very respectful and privileged to be in that intimate position to be at these places with these people.

JB: You talk about it in the documentary itself I don’t mind asking that, given the reputation Cirque and Apple Corps have for being very controlling parties, did you find that control trickling over into the way your film was coming together.
AW: It’s for sure that if you’re making a film with two huge entities, I can’t sit here and tell you that nobody ever looked at our film during the shoot. What I can say is that for the amount of time we had to shoot this and the amount of material that we got, we had the freedom to make the film without Cirque or Apple looking over our shoulders while we were shooting it. They also weren’t giving me hundreds of days of shooting either so we really had to plan to be there at the right times. So they weren’t telling us what to shoot but they also weren’t letting us be there all the time.


JB: And yet you still got to establish the emotional arch you mentioned earlier.
AW: I wanted it to be as emotional as possible to really get you into the heart of the experiences. I wanted to talk about George [Harrison’s] passing; I wanted to talk about John [Lennon] having passed. I wanted to talk about how people were dealing with these issues as well as the creation of the show. I was looking at the Beatles as a family. They’ve gone through fights. They’ve gone through deaths. They’re linked together by history, by legacy. That was something I thought was really important, interesting. I had not seen them portrayed that way. I had always seen them portrayed as fun guys who had gone through all this crazy stuff. I was lucky enough to find all the human stories behind all this.

JB: You also managed to get some very candid moments with these iconic figures.
AW: It’s like when Paul McCartney told me that he wakes up surprised sometimes and thinks, “Wow, I was in the Beatles.” It was amazing when he told me that but also at a fundamental level, that is really interesting. And then you got the story between George [Martin] and Giles [Martin]; what a gorgeous story. Giles is 36 years old. His father was 36 years old when he signed the Beatles. Now his father is losing his sense of hearing. You’ve got old school and new school working together. In remastering for LOVE, he gets to go through everything that his father has done that made him this legend and now turn it into something new for now. That’s amazing. How many fathers and sons get to go through that kind of experience?

JB: Sounds like you were pretty taken with the emotional elements too?
AW: For sure. Olivia Harrison, this wasn’t a cash grab for her. It was really George Harrison wanting to do something with the music of the Beatles and Cirque de Soleil. They didn’t know what that was yet. There were meetings and lawyers and red tape. It wasn’t even clear that something would happen when George passed. But it was Olivia who came back because this was George’s last wish. It was something he really believed in. For me, the emotion was always where I wanted to go with it. From where I was standing, and I’m the one translates that for the viewers, that’s what I was feeling. For Olivia Harrison to listen to her husband’s song and for George Martin to be playing that song in the studio in what maybe one of the last times. She knows that he won’t be around for a lot longer and that her husband has just passed. These are the moments that we really wanted to show. This is why George Martin says that he knows what their legacy is and what it means, that he lives with it every day.

ALL TOGETHER NOW will be released on DVD in America exclusively through Best Buy on October 21.


Cirque Du Soleil's All Together Now - Long Trailer - The top video clips of the week are here

Black Sheep @ the 2008 Festival Nouveau Cinema

If I were 37 years old, you wouldn’t be calling me old (at least I hope you wouldn’t) but you certainly wouldn’t be looking at me like something new either. Somehow though, after 37 years of existence in Montreal, the Festival Nouveau Cinema still warrants its title. Year after year, the festival offers Montreal filmgoers a variety of fresh films that range in style and genre and are anything but ordinary. This year is certainly no different and I am fortunate enough to have the whole week off to drift in and out of the dark cinemas as I please so that I can report back to you about all the wonders I was privileged to see. The following are the Top 5 titles I am most excited about …

ENTRE LES MURS
(THE CLASS)


This is actually the festival’s closing film selection and what a fantastic selection it is. Laurent Cantet’s adaptation of Francois Begaudeau’s novel was the surprise winner of the Palmes d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The film is a hybrid of documentary style and activist thinking, told in a loose narrative form. Begaudeau plays himself, a French teacher in what could simply be described as a difficult Paris classroom but that would be a gross understatement. A lesson needs to be learned and I’m sure by the film’s close, we will have learnt just as much as the kids in class.

FILTH AND WISDOM


After years of being laughed out of Hollywood for uh, poor, acting attempts, Madonna has finally gotten the point. People don’t want to see her in front of the camera. So in taking a lesson from filmmaker hubby, Guy Ritchie, she has decided to try her hand at directing instead. It may have received mixed reviews from its Berlin film festival premiere earlier this year but the curiosity factor is just too great to resist.

RACHEL GETTING MARRIED


I am extremely excited for this much talked about Jonathan Demme picture. This is primarily because I’ve already seen it and cannot wait to get married again. I caught this film at its North American premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival and cried frequently throughout the film when I wasn’t in awe of how surprisingly visceral it was. When I left the screening, I was disoriented, stunned. This is rare for someone who sees a lot of movies, let me tell you. That said, I will not say too much about the film because it just needs to be experienced.

ALL TOGETHER NOW


I am not the richest guy around so even though I would love to take a short trip out to Vegas to catch the Beatles’ highly acclaimed Cirque de Soleil show, LOVE, I simply cannot. For now, I will have to settle for the closest thing to it, Adrian Willis’s behind the scenes documentary, ALL TOGETHER NOW. Willis has lensed a number of Cirque shows prior so he is no stranger to capturing the remarkably magical experience that only the Cirque de Soleil can create. And even though it isn’t the same as being there, there are advantages to this experience. If I was fortunate enough to find myself a seat at the show itself, I’m fairly positive I would not be privy to Paul McCartney’s reaction to this unexpected interpretaton.

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK


This is another film that has yet to connect with audiences in its festival run from earlier this year. It has been touched up though and the world will finally get to see how the mind that penned the genius works, ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND and BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, will approach directing his first feature. To call Charlie Kaufman unique is too facile. His way of thinking is just far enough beyond the masses so as not speak above them but to present them with situations they can understand but could never have imagined themselves. Given that SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK seems to be about a giant reconstruction of the city within an immense airplane hanger, I would say we’re in for another mind melt.

The Festival Nouveau Cinema is on now and take it from me, you need to get your tickets right away. I was thinking that being accredited for the festival meant I could just waltz in to whatever film I wanted but not so. Apparently you still need to get a ticket and I was rejected from my first film already. Good times. No, but seriously, there are some serious good times to be had. For a complete list of films, please visit the Festival Nouveau Cinema web site. And be sure to check back on Black Sheep throughout the festival as I report back on these films and a dozen others (from MAN ON WIRE to ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO and more!)

ACROSS THE UNIVERSE

Written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais
Directed by Julie Taymor


“Because the sky is blue, it makes me cry. Because the sky is blue.”

Staring at a blue sky for two hours is almost required viewing to settle your mind from the visually lost schizophrenia that is Julie Taymor’s ACROSS THE UNIVERSE. How else can you undo the damage from being subjected to an exhaustingly lengthy collage of overblown imagery at the hands of an over inflated ego? I can only imagine the horror that must have swept over the executives’ faces after screening this film for the first time. It has been widely publicized that Taymor entered a creative war over the final cut of this film with her producers who wanted to release their own cut of the film. They said the film needed more focus, less experimenting as she hid behind the shield of artistic integrity. Ordinarily, I would never side with any form of censorship but perhaps she should have left her bias in the car and taken a few of the tips that were perhaps being given to her in the best interest of her film. Maybe then, ACROSS THE UNIVERSE could have told a functional story that would have captured some attention, given it some ultimate meaning and made this all-Beatles musical the magical journey it so desperately wanted to be and could have been. Or maybe it would have been worse but I can’t see how.


ACROSS THE UNIVERSE tells the story, and I say that lightly, of a young lad named Jude (Jim Sturgess), who travels across the ocean to find his father. Find him he does in absolutely no time and then he just bounces around from here to there in pursuit of nothing at all. He meets a girl (Evan Rachel Wood) and falls in love; he gets a room in New York City and paints when everybody else is either going to war in Vietnam or protesting it. A bevy of other characters are randomly introduced, bring nothing to the whole (which is paper thin as it is) and then disappear after accomplishing just as much nothing. It is all so aimless; I’m surprised my neck doesn’t hurt more from all the shaking my head did in bewilderment. The style, which can only be described as a refusal to commit to any one style, only makes it more difficult to get taken in. As a viewer, the suspended disbelief necessary to enjoy a musical as one should still requires a firm foundation. Taymor tries to establish a gritty reality with Jude working the docks in Liverpool but the leap to where the music happens, and the magic is supposed to, is always different and seldom seems appropriate. I never thought I would be begging for plausibility in a musical but this was just ridiculous


While I commend Taymor for incorporating 90% on-location singing into this musical in an attempt to pump a more real quality into the practice, I want to sit her down to talk about some other basic concepts like character, meaning and purpose (concepts she so easily incorporated into her far superior FRIDA). Surely she has seen Baz Luhrmann’s MOULIN ROUGE. Luhrmann’s film employed the same musical technique to appropriate existing lyrical content (including some by the Beatles) and contextualized it within his story of forbidden lovers. The reason his film worked is because there was a solid story driving it forward and characters that were developed through that story and their songs. ACROSS THE UNIVERSE seems more interested in its high concept usage of the Beatles repertoire that characters seem to be included so that certain songs can be included. It is certainly lovely to see a young high school cheerleader sing a slowed down version of “I Wanna Hold your Hand” to herself about a fellow cheerleader, just as it is heartbreaking to watch a young boy caught in the streets of the Detroit riots singing “Let It Be” amidst the violence but both of these potentially powerful moments and strong performances are hollowed out by their complete lack of context. How can you be expected to care when you have no idea why this story is suddenly being told? And then to find out, there was really no significant point to begin with? Without purpose, all you have are a bunch of people singing old songs on screen.


At one point, more specifically when multiple Selma Hayek’s in nurse uniforms seductively administered drugs to war patients spinning around a medical ward to “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” I found myself wondering just how many Beatles songs were still left to be sung. When a film has no distinct purpose, it also has no clear ending in sight. I was beginning to fear that Taymor might actually turn me off the Beatles with this disaster but fortunately, the Beatles are timeless and genius and something so laughable as ACROSS THE UNIVERSE is not going to diminish their beauty. It’s like bearing witness to a bad karaoke performance of your favorite song; you cringe while it’s happening but once you hear it again for yourself, the mastery that was temporarily taken from it comes back in waves of vibrant colour and splashes of insight that touch your soul. The painful experience is easily forgotten and you ask yourself, across what universe?