Posted by admin on Sep 10, 2011 in News & Rumors | Comments Off
Thanks to Toronto International Film Festival for hosting this broadcast which has now ended. If you caught it, add your comments below. If you missed it, we are hoping to rebroadcast it soon .
Article source: http://www.u2.com/news/title/in-conversation-in-toronto
Posted by admin on Sep 9, 2011 in News & Rumors | Comments Off
Oscar-winning documentarian Davis Guggenheim first helped a U2 member touch the sky after he directed axeman The Edge in It Might Get Loud, a 2008 salute to rock guitar.
But Guggenheim’s involvement with From the Sky Down, his U2 doc world-premiering Thursday as TIFF’s gala opener, really started way back with Boy, the band’s 1980 debut album. That’s when he became a fan.
“My brother brought home Boy the year I was 17,” says Guggenheim, 47, en route to Toronto for the big show.
“Up to that point, I loved music but it was someone else’s music. And when I heard Boy it was like, ‘Oh, this is my music, you know?’
“U2 was the first band that I grew up with and felt a kinship with. So I’m a big fan, which is maybe a problem. As a journalist, it’s like covering a murder in your own home: How do you keep your sense of objectivity and perspective?”
Having worked with The Edge previously was “my way in” to U2’s tight brotherhood, Guggenheim says. But these Irish superstars had also seen and appreciated his previous docs, which include the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth and the Sundance-winning Waiting for “Superman.”
They’d also seen Thom Zimny’s The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town, and Stephen Kijak’s Stones in Exile, docs from last year chronicling the birth of important Bruce Springsteen and Rolling Stones album.
U2 wanted their own doc for 1991’s Achtung Baby, their seventh album, which marked a changing point for the group’s sound and identity, moving from sloganeering rock towards dance abandon.
Earlier this year, The Edge, singer Bono, bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. asked Davis to make what became From the Sky Down, the first doc to open TIFF in its 36-year history.
“I think I should be happy about that,” Davis says of the historical precedent. “Is it good enough to do that?”
Fans will be the ultimate judge, but first, the details.
Q. You could have picked a more conventional U2 album to celebrate, such as the breakthrough 1987 disc The Joshua Tree. Why Achtung Baby?
A. What I was drawn to was how they felt about that moment in their life. Each of them had a very different perspective, but it was definitely a tumultuous time for them. It was a time when they either had to reinvent themselves or perish. They reinvented themselves in an incredible way, but it was touch and go!
Q. How does Achtung Baby rank on your list of U2 faves?
A. What’s incredible about U2 is that it’s hard to pick. With the Rolling Stones, I could say Exile on Main Street is my favourite album. U2 albums are so wildly different, from Boy to Joshua Tree to Achtung Baby. But it’s certainly one of my favourites. And now, knowing the story, it’s amazing that a band at the height of their popularity chooses to go completely the other way. All the fans wanted was another “Where the Streets Have No Name” and they gave them the exact opposite. I think that’s what’s unique about the band: the way they continue to reinvent themselves.
Q. It’s incredible that it’s still just the four original guys, decades later.
A. Can you believe it? They met at school when they were 16 and 17. They grew up together and they stayed together. There seems to be a law of physics that says a rock band has to explode or implode or die away as a sort of memory of themselves. And they’ve defied that law of physics. To me, that’s the big mystery of the band. I think the revelatory word in the movie, in this regard, is “collective.”
Q. In the film you show Bono calling out chord changes, as the group rehearses for its Glastonbury Festival performance last June. Is Bono always this much in charge?
A. I think this is a better question for them, but I get a sense it was always that way: that it’s very collaborative and a collective but he’s the guy calling out the chords, you know? But they each bring something to the table. That’s my sense of it.
Q. The film uses archival footage to focus on the writing of “Mysterious Ways” and “One” as the two Achtung Baby tracks of greatest importance. How did this come about?
A. It’s magic. I did these solo interviews with them, just sitting down with a microphone, and got these intimate interviews and each one of them talked about that moment when nothing was working (during the Achtung Baby sessions) and they were just mad as hell at each other and nothing was coming out of it. . .
And then this song (“Mysterious Ways”) happens. And I go, “Well, this is the moment. Let’s go after it.” We went into the archive and the original recordings from those sessions were there. They were playing “Mysterious Ways” and these chords arrived for “One,” and then the next moment when they pull those chords out to start another song, and wow! It’s like you’re an archaeologist and you’re digging through the dirt and the rubble and you find this stone that holds the key to this mystery.
Q. The band members coined the word “Bongolese” to describe how Bono uses an improvised scat singing method to come up with song lyrics. Does he do that for every song?
A. I don’t know if it’s for every song but he does it a lot. What’s interesting, and it’s where the title of the movie comes from, is how he talks about how the words come at the end and, in the middle of that, he’s doing this thing conjuring up the melody and conjuring up the feeling, and words are kind of an afterthought.
Q. Did you get any feel for where the band is headed now? Do they feel rejuvenated?
A. We didn’t talk about “now.” Maybe I should have, but we just didn’t talk about it. I know they’re deep into the next album. There’s an excitement about it.
Hamilton Spectator
Article source: http://www.thespec.com/news/world/article/591545--q-a-with-u2-documentary-director
Posted by admin on Sep 9, 2011 in News & Rumors | Comments Off
Is Anonymous this year’s The King Speech? Is George Clooney a show-off? Are documentaries back? These questions and many more are likely to be answered over the next ten days, as the 36th Toronto International Film Festival, which kicked off Thursday night with a gala screening of Davis Guggenheim’s Bono-worshiping U2 doc, From the Sky Down, shifts into hyperdrive. North America’s biggest film fest, a launching pad for Oscar contenders and awards season wannabes, boasts 268 features, 68 shorts and Clooney times-two. The impressive and impeccably cool resident of Lake Como, Italy, comes to this bustling Ontario town (no recession here, it seems) with a pair of serious contenders: He stars in The Descendants, Alexander (Sideways) Payne’s Hawaii-set portrait of an absentee dad reconnecting with his daughters, and co-stars in The Ides of March, as a liberal-leaning Pennsylvania governor (ha!) running for the presidency. Clooney directed this one, and gives Ryan Gosling, playing a key campaign strategist, a shot at the best actor sweepstakes. (In fact, if The Descendants is as strong as its early buzz – I see it tomorrow – Clooney and Gosling could be competing for the same Oscar.) As for Anonymous, the Elizabethan intriguer stars Rhys Ifans as Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford, a British noble who, Roland Emmerich’s film suggests, actually wrote many of Shakespeare’s plays. The film is set against the political upheaval of Queen Elizabeth I’s succession, and Vanessa Redgrave plays the queen, and right there is reason enough to see this. In addition to Guggenheim’s U2 homage, the documentary field at TIFF 36 includes Werner Herzog’s Into the Abyss, the profile of a Texas Death Row killer; Alex Gibney’s Last Gladiators, about hockey players (a hockey doc in Canada? — no one’s going to want to see that); Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, the latest chapter on the fates of the three men just-released from prison after serving 18 years for the killing of three boys (charges that DNA tests finally proved false); a Morgan Spurlock survey of the annual fanboy fete, Comic-Con, and a Neil Young concert film from director Jonatham Demme.
Article source: http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/onmovies/129517488.html
Posted by admin on Sep 9, 2011 in News & Rumors | Comments Off
U2 frontman Bono says the band came “very” close to breaking up during the tension-filled studio sessions while making their pivotal 1991 album Achtung Baby, as seen in TIFF’s opening night documentary From The Sky Down.
Bono made the statement during a 40-minute Friday afternoon TIFF QA, in response to a twitter question that asked him and U2 guitarist The Edge to judge, on a scale of one to 10, how close they came to splitting 20 years ago.
“‘Very’ is Irish for ‘nine,’” joked Bono.
Added The Edge: “I think what was really at stake was the end of the trust that bound the boys together. It was pretty close.”
The Edge basically played the straight(er) man to Bono’s comedian at the session, with director Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) also on stage.
The singer got things off to a musical start by serenading the press with Love Me Tender as they were ushered into a TIFF Bell Lightbox sixth-floor room, where all news conferences are held, via two elevators that couldn’t keep up with demand.
Bono said of being filmed and interviewed by Guggenheim: “I feel like I was mugged.”
“I’m still trying to figure it out how we let him in,” added The Edge.
When asked via twitter what the Achtung Baby song Even Better Than The Real Thing was all about, Bono cracked: “I’m thinking of Woody Allen’s line: ‘There’s no such thing as bad sex.’ I think the carnality of it is an important part of what was going on in our lives.”
Bono reported more seriously that Q magazine in England had commissioned an entire covers album of Achtung Baby songs, featuring Jack White covering Love Is Blindness, Depeche Mode doing You’re So Cruel, Patti Smith’s rendition of Until The End of The World and Damien Race covering One.
He said the band learned some important lessons about their creative process while making the movie.
“I found it a little humiliating to realize that we were so inept,” said Bono. “And yet it was self-imposed crapness. Like we were trying to make music that we didn’t understand. And the band seems to do its best work when it’s in that environment. And when it gets comfortable it’s not as interesting. And so, there may be some more crap coming up.”
He added later: “We’re at that moment again. U2′s been on the verge of irrelevance for the last 20 years — made some great work, I hope, along the way, occasionally faux pas, but this moment, where we’re at, feels like real close to the edge of irrelevance. We have to go to that place again if we’re to survive.”
U2 and The Edge said they are currently inspired by new bands such as Foster The People and Montreal’s Arcade Fire, as well as veterans such as Neil Young and Patti Smith.
“For me a seminal album for us would have been Patti Smith’s Horses,” said Bono. “Talk about brutal honesty. That opening line, ‘Jesus died for somebody else’s sins but not mine,’ when I was 16 (I was thinking), ‘I do not know what this woman’s on about but I better find out.’”
A new documentary about Young from director Jonathan Demme (shot at Massey Hall) is at TIFF, Bono said: “Clearly a sacred talent. Listening to his music you feel like you should take your shoes off.”
Article source: http://www.torontosun.com/2011/09/09/u2-bandmates-recall-near-split
Posted by admin on Sep 9, 2011 in News & Rumors | Comments Off
From The Sky Down opened at the Toronto International Film Festival tonight with hundreds of fans turning up as Bono, Edge and director Davis Guggenheim walked the red carpet.
‘Did anyone tell you this was a documentary?’ joked the director, before thanking Paul McGuinness, Brian Celler and U2′s management team for their commitment to the project.
Davis welcomed Michael Brook, the composer and J Cassidy, editor of the movie, before introducing ‘Mr The Edge and Mr The Bono.’
‘We’re very protective of our privacy and particularly of our creative process,’ explained Bono. ‘There’s an old saying, ‘If you knew what went into the sausage you wouldn’t eat it..
‘The only way we were going to do this was if we could find a director who was as curious about the creative process… we couldn’t get Wim Wenders!’ he added, to wide applause.
Bono described Davis’ enjoyment of esoteric subject matter: ‘I mean – who could make a feature length film on guitar players?’ (It Might Get Loud, in 2009, starred Jimmy Page, Jack White and The Edge.)
Edge spoke about Michael Brook and Danny Lanois, describing how shocking it was to look back twenty years ‘and see how close our band came to disintegrating.’
‘If it was left up to us – it might have had a lot more jokes and a lot more asides. But what Davis has done is remarkable – hope you enjoy the film.’
Here’s Bono, talking to reporters, about ‘waiting for the muse to arrive’ and in a BBC report talking about how ‘we ended all that people loved about our band.’
Article source: http://www.u2.com/news/title/red-carpet-in-toronto
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