Behind the music

Leave it to a music producer to reimagine the whole idea of the music doc.

“I’ve never appreciated watching music documentaries, where a whole bunch of people are interviewed talking about another guy.” So says Daniel Lanois, the noted music producer behind U2’s The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree, Peter Gabriel’s So and Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind. All that talk in music docs bores him: “If it’s a film about Jimi Hendrix, I want to see Jimi play.”

But Lanois also finds most music docs that instead try to capture live musical performances equally unsatisfying. When we sat down with him at the South By Southwest Film Festival in March, he explained that those films focus on faces, when the real action in music is elsewhere.

So when Lanois set out to document the way he works, he was searching for a third way. “We were striving for a blend of capturing the moment of magic in music on camera,” he explains, “and then also having some nice transitions that were largely built around audio transitions, because this is my corner of expertise.”

While the resulting film, Here Is What Is, does include some interviews about music with people like longtime mentor and collaborator Brian Eno and some studio footage, Lanois isn’t showing off his clout. He’s just interested in showing us how music-making looks. The real power of the doc comes from those ‘magic moments.’ Never one to let the established way of doing things get in his way, Lanois films musicians with a producer’s eye for what matters. The film opens with an extended long take focusing on the hands of noted pianist Garth Hudson as he plays. We don’t see Hudson’s face until several minutes into the film. “We decided that yes, it would be interesting to see Garth in full, but ultimately, what is fascinating to me is how he moves around the keys,” says Lanois. “He does this little touching before he presses, almost like the playing of the blind man.” Even for a nonmusician, the careful attention to Hudson’s hands is a revelation.

Many filmmakers would have balked at holding the camera on a musician’s hands for so long, and that’s probably why Lanois opted not to collaborate with an established documentarian. Instead, he teamed up with “the two Adams.” That would be sound technician Adam Samuels, who has worked with Lanois in the studio for a number of years, and Adam Vollick, a photographer with no previous film credits.

The three share a directing credit, and it’s clear from talking to them (Vollick continues to film Lanois, even during interviews, but he chimes in at Lanois’s urging) that they approach filmmaking the same way Lanois approaches music: It’s a mix of insight developed from years in the business, intuition and happy accidents.

In the film’s best sequence, Lanois sits at a mixing console that looks about as complicated as the cockpit of a 747 and mixes a song while explaining what he’s after. It’s like a crash course in the nuts and bolts of what a music producer does. Even this centerpiece of the film was the result of casual experimentation. “One morning, Adam [Vollick] phoned me down at the studio, and I said, ‘Well, I’m just going to relax into a mix here. Just film it the best you can.’ I started and he had a body-mike on me and I just talked while I mixed.” For the whole song, Vollick and his camera remain behind Lanois, looking over his shoulder. Recalls Vollick, “I slowly crept up and actually stepped on the piano bench where Daniel was sitting.”

Lanois takes up the story: “He couldn’t go around to the other side. And then we thought, well, that was just a demo of the idea. Now let’s set up the cameras properly. But we never got the vibe back.” Even without showing Lanois’s face, the sequence speaks volumes. “I was in the middle of mixing this song and my body language…when I mix I don’t realize I’m doing what I’m doing. And when I saw myself on camera, I thought, well at least that’s a guy who’s into what he’s doing, and so the motion of the body is almost as significant as the instruction that it’s giving.”

Lanois has opted to forgo the usual distribution model for both the film and the album he recorded during the documentary. Instead, he and the Adams set up a website. Rejecting the old business models, Lanois has made the album available for download in a high-fidelity WAV format with no proprietary DRM (digital rights management) coding, and the DVD is region-free, so it can play on any DVD player in the world. For a price, of course. A bold experimenter he may be, but Lanois is no dummy.

The film and the album of Here Is What Is are both available at redfloorrecords.com.

---

• 
•