And we're rolling
The new film from Martin Scorsese sees him turn once more to one of his greatest passions: rock'n'roll. And who better as his subjects than the Rolling Stones? In an exclusive interview, the great director talks to Craig McLean
Mick's biceps. Keith's eyeliner. Ronnie's bum. Charlie's ... Charlie-ness. Shine a Light, a new documentary film of the Rolling Stones in concert in a small New York theatre, does just that - it trains a bright beam of illumination on these four icons; the cinema-goer is dragged hard up against Jagger, Richards, Wood and Watts. We can scrutinise those faces, those bodies, those figures that encapsulate - really, truly, properly - the rock of ages.
Shine a Light is the Stones as up close and personal you're ever going to get. None the less, even if you're a film-maker whose artistry and status rivals the Stones' own, there's only so much intimacy you'll be able to capture. Even if you're Martin Scorsese, who directed Shine a Light, you don't get too close - Jagger, it seems, is very much the boss and Jagger hates doing interviews - but you get close enough.
Scorsese, who is a long-standing Rolling Stones fanatic, filmed the band at the Beacon Theatre in New York last September. The documentary partly grew out of a script project that the director and the frontman have been working on for eight years, an epic-sounding saga that chronicles the music business from the Sixties to the Nineties. Jagger, who has some decent form in movies too, will produce.
So there's an understanding between film-maker and subject. The result is a remarkable document, a living, breathing, rock'n'rolling portrait of a bunch of blokes in their sixties who sound like the most vital young cats on the block.
When I speak to 64-year-old Scorsese he is still hard at work on the sound mix for the movie. He is, true to legend, a raspy-voiced blabbermouth, a torrent of ideas and insights, repetitive and riffing; the Italian-American cinema maestro who sounds like so many of his hallowed characters.
As we talk, in the background I can hear the faint strains of some of the songs performed so punchily in Shine a Light: 'Jumpin' Jack Flash'; 'Tumbling Dice'; 'Loving Cup' (a duet with Jack White); 'Faraway Eyes'; 'Live With Me' (Jagger gets jiggy on the mic with Christina Aguilera); 'Champagne and Reefer', which Jagger first heard performed by Muddy Waters and for which, at the Beacon, the Stones were joined by Buddy Guy; 'Sympathy For the Devil'. I can hear those tunes and I can still, in my head, see it all.
Why the Stones, and why now?
Um... Hah hah - it's a hard... I never saw any reason why not. So that question never came to mind.
How do you approach making, as the PR spiel has it, the 'ultimate Rolling Stones concert film' about the 'world's greatest rock'n'roll band'?
I don't know! Look, I have a history with their music, their music has influenced a lot of my film-making. I didn't know them. I have only seen them in concert a few times over the years. One of the most important things about the Rolling Stones' music is that the formative time when the music was really important to me [when] I was living with the music, was 1963 to '69 or '70, and into the Seventies, too. But let me put it this way: between '63 and '70, those seven years, the music that they made I found myself gravitating to. I would listen to it a great deal. And ultimately, that fuelled movies like Mean Streets and later pictures of mine, Raging Bull to a certain extent and certainly GoodFellas and Casino and other pictures over the years.
You used 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' and 'Tell Me' to great effect in Mean Streets ...
Mean Streets owes a debt to the Stones. The actual visualisation of sequences and scenes in Mean Streets comes from a lot of their music, of living with their music and listening to it. Not just the songs I use in the film. No, it's about the tone and the mood of their music, their attitude. The music itself. And ultimately, over the years what I became aware of - and this is something like a detective story, I really didn't know about music, I just responded to it - was that their music is blues-based. And I happen to really like the blues. Their music introduced me to the blues to a certain extent.
And so, the point I wanna make is I never saw them in performance until late '69, I think, November '69 at the Madison Square Garden in New York. So all the inspiration that I was able to put into Mean Streets has to do with just listening to their music. Not watching them on stage. It came from the image I got in my head when I was listening to the Aftermath album, or 'Jumpin' Jack Flash', 'Sympathy For the Devil' - how 'Sympathy For the Devil' became this score for our lives. It was everywhere at that time, it was being played on the radio. 'Satisfaction', everywhere being played on the radio. When 'Satisfaction' starts, the authority of the guitar riff that begins it is something that became anthemic.
I didn't intend that. I just kept listening to it. Then I kept imagining scenes in movies. And interpreting. It's not just imagining a scene of a tracking shot around a person's face or a car scene. It really was [taking] events and incidents in my own life that I was trying to interpret into film-making, to a story, a narrative. And it seemed that those songs inspired me to do that. To find a way to put them on film. To find a way to put those stories on film.
So the debt is incalculable. I don't know what to say. In my mind, I did this film 40 years ago. It just happened to get around to being filmed right now.
Is it true that to secure the rights to use 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' and 'Tell Me' in Mean Streets, you spent $30,000 of your $750,000 budget?
Apparently, yes. Jonathan Taplin was my producer, I told him I really needed that music. I wanted a third song, 'The Last Time'. But we couldn't afford it. We just couldn't afford it.
But those two songs meant so much to you that you were willing to spend a big chunk of a tight budget on them?
As I say, their music made it possible for me to make that picture.
The Stones excavated the previously little-played Exile on Main Street track 'Shine a Light' for their 1995 live album Stripped. Why did you pick that as the title for your documentary?
It's a gospel-type song. I like the 'light', the idea of [filming them] at the Beacon Theatre. A light being placed once again on the Stones, illuminating the Stones. Illuminating their music and the contribution that their music has made to the culture, and to me. In the picture, 'Shine a Light' is not played - only at the end credits.
You spent months planning this shoot - what did that involve?
Oh, everything you could imagine. I was trying to figure out a narrative structure, then I abandoned that. So I decided to shoot a great deal of what was going on around [them], the preparations - but the preparations were being done while I was completing the mix of [Scorsese's Oscar-winning 2006 film] The Departed. And thinking that The Departed would not be a film that would be well-received critically, I just hoped that it would do well at the box-office.
I was finishing The Departed while I was starting to do the main preparations for Shine a Light, so all my attention went to Shine a Light
You know, I get that way with certain films - certain films I wanna ... expel! And it was just - how shall I put it? - it was the old cliche of the weight taken off your shoulders. This was three tonnes taken off my shoulders in terms of The Departed. I couldn't wait to be finished. So, it was finished, and we got it down to the line, and the next thing I knew I was shooting this movie with the Rolling Stones as a kind of cathartic experience. It's really about performance. Forty years of performance.
As part of your research, did you watch - or rewatch - the other classic Stones films, Sympathy For the Devil, Gimme Shelter or even Cocksucker Blues?
I watched Cocksucker Blues, it's a film I like a great deal. It really is, of that time and place, a major document. Gimme Shelter I saw again a while ago so I didn't look at it again. I saw Sympathy For the Devil. Now that's quintessential. That movie still, with the vignettes that [director Jean-Luc] Godard intercuts, the rehearsal sessions with this still powerful and disturbing movie. It makes you rethink; it redefines your way of looking at life and reality, and politics.
Your British producing partner Graham King calls you 'one of the most collaborative guys you'll ever meet'. Was that the case making this movie?
Um, yeah ... Going back to Sympathy For the Devil, the important thing in that picture, I think, besides of course the concepts and what Godard has done, is the nature of really seeing the Rolling Stones put together a major masterpiece, 'Sympathy For the Devil'. It's really like being a part of their rehearsals. It's quite extraordinary. But collaborative? Yes. I like to work with people ... It depends on who you're working with.
One of the earliest scenes in Shine a Light involves Jagger, pre-concert, being presented with a model of the stage set at the Beacon Theatre. He is unimpressed. 'It looks like a doll's house,' he says, testily. He can see no 'rhyme or reason' why it's been designed that way. He is told that that's what they thought he wanted. Jagger flatly denies this.
Later we see Scorsese fretting about a lack of a running order for the show, intercut with shots of Jagger on a plane and in a hotel, leisurely working his way through lists of song titles - 'well-known' Stones numbers must be balanced with 'medium-known'. He blithely informs the camera that the running order will probably be decided at the last minute anyway ... Meanwhile, Marty's tearing his hair out - or making like he's tearing his hair out - because he needs to know what the opening song is so he can position his cameras ...
That 'collaborative' process - Mick Jagger comes across as the man running the show. Did he let you into the inner circle to make this documentary?
Yes, yes, he did. Part of making any endeavour is that each one has its own special problems. It's the nature of the process.
Mick objects to the model of the stage-set ...
It doesn't matter who objects to what. It's a matter of the spirit of the way things are done. Any film, or to me any creative endeavour, no matter who you're working with, is, in many cases, a wonderful experience. But I always, always complain about it. Complaining is part of the process. If I'm not complaining, I'm not having a good time, hah hah!
Mick famously dislikes being interviewed - how did you deal with that?
I didn't do any interviews! What do you want to know from them? What do you want to know from the Rolling Stones? What? Forty years they've been shot on film. They've been recorded, they've said everything, they've said everything backwards, sideways, upside down. I mean, what more could you know from them? Except the music and the performance. The music stays. And the performance stays. This is something that I found inspiring. So I decided not to interview anybody.
Do you think the Stones represent the still flickering flame of Sixties anti-establishment rebellion in these rather desperate times?
Only in that the truth of the music comes from the blues. And it's their version of that. It's their reassessment of the blues, their rethinking of the blues. I think that's what lasts. And the blues reflects certain aspects, certain feelings we have as human beings. And you either respond to it or you don't.
In case it wasn't already apparent, Martin Scorsese loves music. He has, of course, form when it comes to the musical documentary. His Bob Dylan documentary No Direction Home was a huge critical hit when broadcast in 2005. His 1978 film about The Band's star-studded final concerts, The Last Waltz, is the greatest film about music ever. If any film challenges it for that honour, it's This is Spinal Tap - a spoof of The Last Waltz, right down to Rob Reiner's depiction of 'Marty DiBergi', the bearded director-interviewer of the dim-witted rock stars.
Just prior to The Last Waltz, he made New York, New York, an ambitious folly of a musical-drama. In most of Scorsese's films, in fact, music is an integral part of the movie's texture, a summing up of all the sounds - Italian opera, crooners, doo-wop, rock'n'roll and more - that Scorsese heard growing up in New York's Little Italy.
How did shooting Shine a Light compare to shooting The Last Waltz?
It's a very different thing. The Last Waltz was a kind of elegy, looking back. The Band are one of the most extraordinary groups ever to exist. There is no music like it. [Onstage] there's Bob Dylan, there's Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Muddy Waters, Neil Young. It was more to do with a kind of a ... not resignation but an acceptance of time passing. In Shine a Light, in my mind, the Stones are still immediate. They still are as young as the Sixties. They still are as young as the way they appeared in the Seventies. In my mind, Shine a Light is something that's still of the present time, and is defiant.
What lessons did you draw from making No Direction Home?
Well, I didn't really film Bob Dylan in that. Actually, I never met Bob Dylan when I did No Direction Home. It was a couple of hundred hours of footage, and of working with his producer and archivist Jeff Rosen. So shaping the story of a creative person, an artist, really was what came out of that. That was finding the story really. Finding the story of a young man who was an artist, going his own way, that was the key there. But that took over two-and-a-half years to even find the story in the footage. Here, this is somewhat different. This is about performance and, as I said, the energy and the inspiration from the performance.
Which other contemporary artists to you listen to?
David Gray I like. I still listen to Van Morrison, of course. Dylan's new albums. Anything Clapton does. I like the White Stripes - to me, that's new.
Arctic Monkeys?
Yes, yes, very interesting. I saw them perform live, too. It was in New York somewhere. But the thing about it is, I think I've kind of stopped being able to have the capacity for new music. Because a lot of it seems to be based on music that I grew up with. And so I don't know what they're saying, I don't know where they're going with it. The bottom line is, I tend to be going back to older and older music. Some people would think it's being contrary, but basically a lot of the music I prefer listening to these days is music that goes back to the baroque period.
Are there any other musicians you would consider making a documentary about?
Not right now.
Mick's nipples. Keef's (new) teeth. Ronnie's sinews. Charlie's ... Charlieness. Shine a Light is less warts'n'all, more balls'n'all. They're in remarkable, hip-shaking, guitar-slinging shape, these granddads. Even given the tousled, charismatic, sullen faces of youth that stare out of the archive footage which Scorsese cuts into the performance, they still look cool now. Even Bill Clinton - for whose Foundation the Beacon show was a benefit, and who turns up with Hillary Clinton, Hillary's mother and a secret service detail - can't match their immense presence.
What makes the Jagger/Richards relationship tick?
Woah. [Pause]. It's interesting. Watching them work together and watching them perform, in an interesting way they seem to be opposites. Mick moves very quickly. Keith moves - but very slowly! They seem to balance each other extraordinarily well. In terms of the music and the lyrics, they seem like a perfect collaborative pair - I guess, the yin and the yang of the group.
Why are we still fascinated by these guys in their sixties, playing at a young man's game?
It's still the power of the music, I think. In my mind it's not about the music of the Sixties or the Seventies or what they did in the Eighties. It's who they are now. And how they play onstage and how they interact. And what that music, and that performance, does to an audience. That's the truth. The truth is there and immediate. You can bring all the history you want to it. And there will be some who certainly disagree with me. But all I know is I'm there and I feel a certain thing. Emotionally and psychologically, I'm affected by it. And it's still inspiring to me. So I couldn't resist. I had to make a movie.
· Shine a Light is in cinemas in late September
guardian
