midzi
03-31-2006, 11:06 AM
I don't even know if anybody reads all these interviews.:p
But here's another one.
Beastie Boys give fans a shot at capturing concert on film
Friday, March 31, 2006
Pioneering hip-hop heroes the Beastie Boys take the standard concert film in a new direction "Awesome: I . . . Shot That," which opens today at the Cedar Lee Theatre in Cleveland Heights (see review page 10). The hyperactive, entertaining documentary was filmed at an October 2004 concert at Madison Square Garden in band's hometown of New York and features a parade of Beastie hits. The group handed digital video cameras to 50 audience members, collected the footage and then edited the best bits into a frenetic whole. Beastie Boy Adam "MCA" Yauch directed the film under the pseudonym "Nathaniel Hornblower."
We talked with Yauch, Mike "Mike D" Diamond and Adam "Ad-rock" Horovitz a few weeks ago while they were in Austin, Texas, promoting the movie at South by Southwest, a major movie, music and interactive entertainment festival.
Plain Dealer: You guys are accustomed to having a lot of eyeballs on you when you are performing. But did having 50 people filming you with digital cameras have any impact on the show as you performed it?
Mike D: Actually, it had very little impact on the performance. For us, in the course of a whole tour, we won't have a lot of nervous energy except for maybe the very first show of the tour and then when we play in New York. For us, New York City and Madison Square Garden are a big deal. We can't escape that mentality in a sense because I grew up going to see the circus there. When we walk into any other sports arena in any other town it's just generic. I will say that as the show was happening, there were a few times when I stopped and said, "Dammit! This show is being filmed. I [expletive] this up!" There were little things. But the New York vibe affected it much more. The other thing is that it was people with hand-held video cameras. It's not like we had a big, boom camera swinging around almost knocking your head off.
What was it like editing this film? Just logging all the video had to be a nightmare.
MCA: There wasn't a whole lot of logging. We loaded in all the video and digitized it. It was 61 different angles with the stuff that was up in the truss and on the DJ. We just tried to sync it up as best we could. Sometimes we had to slow things down or chop things up to get them to sync. We did three different cuts. The film editors each took 20 cameras. They did a cut. And then I looked at those different cuts and took some of the best parts of those and then started working on it from there.
The graininess of some of the footage gives the film a more authentic feel.
Yauch: The idea came from somebody who had shot something on their camera phone, a part of our concert, and they posted it on their Web site. We got the idea from that. That was the interesting part -- that it was low-res and grainy and at eye level. It wasn't a trained camera operator. There was some real frenetic feeling to it.
You mentioned New York is your hometown and that it is a special place to be. You made an album dedicated to New York after 9/11. After all these years and all the gigs in New York, what is it about performing there that still gives you butterflies?
Mike D: It all revolves around our life experience there. It's where we grew up and we have a tremendous attachment and love for the city. There is so much music that we grew up listening to there, so many ideas and people and different cultures that we were exposed to. Now, you have the World Wide Web and different means of accessing things. That didn't exist when were growing up. But we grew up in New York, so we were exposed to those things because of our proximity to them.
Very few bands in this business stay together for any length of time. How do you make it work?
Ad-rock: It's difficult.
Mike D: It's trying. It's hard on me because Adam is abusive to me. I got to hand him a beating once in a while.
MCA: And it's hard for me to watch that. It's hard for me to watch the pain between these two.
Mike D: We've been hanging since before I was 15.
Ad-rock: And we basically have the same friends we've had since then.
Mike D: I don't know what that means. Maybe arrested development.
This film seems primed for the special DVD treatment.
Mike D: There are some important special features. There is a barbecue battle royale on the DVD that is going to be very important viewing material. It's a barbecue battle that spans the globe. The inception of it starts in Australia and carries across the pond and takes place in Los Angeles.
But here's another one.
Beastie Boys give fans a shot at capturing concert on film
Friday, March 31, 2006
Pioneering hip-hop heroes the Beastie Boys take the standard concert film in a new direction "Awesome: I . . . Shot That," which opens today at the Cedar Lee Theatre in Cleveland Heights (see review page 10). The hyperactive, entertaining documentary was filmed at an October 2004 concert at Madison Square Garden in band's hometown of New York and features a parade of Beastie hits. The group handed digital video cameras to 50 audience members, collected the footage and then edited the best bits into a frenetic whole. Beastie Boy Adam "MCA" Yauch directed the film under the pseudonym "Nathaniel Hornblower."
We talked with Yauch, Mike "Mike D" Diamond and Adam "Ad-rock" Horovitz a few weeks ago while they were in Austin, Texas, promoting the movie at South by Southwest, a major movie, music and interactive entertainment festival.
Plain Dealer: You guys are accustomed to having a lot of eyeballs on you when you are performing. But did having 50 people filming you with digital cameras have any impact on the show as you performed it?
Mike D: Actually, it had very little impact on the performance. For us, in the course of a whole tour, we won't have a lot of nervous energy except for maybe the very first show of the tour and then when we play in New York. For us, New York City and Madison Square Garden are a big deal. We can't escape that mentality in a sense because I grew up going to see the circus there. When we walk into any other sports arena in any other town it's just generic. I will say that as the show was happening, there were a few times when I stopped and said, "Dammit! This show is being filmed. I [expletive] this up!" There were little things. But the New York vibe affected it much more. The other thing is that it was people with hand-held video cameras. It's not like we had a big, boom camera swinging around almost knocking your head off.
What was it like editing this film? Just logging all the video had to be a nightmare.
MCA: There wasn't a whole lot of logging. We loaded in all the video and digitized it. It was 61 different angles with the stuff that was up in the truss and on the DJ. We just tried to sync it up as best we could. Sometimes we had to slow things down or chop things up to get them to sync. We did three different cuts. The film editors each took 20 cameras. They did a cut. And then I looked at those different cuts and took some of the best parts of those and then started working on it from there.
The graininess of some of the footage gives the film a more authentic feel.
Yauch: The idea came from somebody who had shot something on their camera phone, a part of our concert, and they posted it on their Web site. We got the idea from that. That was the interesting part -- that it was low-res and grainy and at eye level. It wasn't a trained camera operator. There was some real frenetic feeling to it.
You mentioned New York is your hometown and that it is a special place to be. You made an album dedicated to New York after 9/11. After all these years and all the gigs in New York, what is it about performing there that still gives you butterflies?
Mike D: It all revolves around our life experience there. It's where we grew up and we have a tremendous attachment and love for the city. There is so much music that we grew up listening to there, so many ideas and people and different cultures that we were exposed to. Now, you have the World Wide Web and different means of accessing things. That didn't exist when were growing up. But we grew up in New York, so we were exposed to those things because of our proximity to them.
Very few bands in this business stay together for any length of time. How do you make it work?
Ad-rock: It's difficult.
Mike D: It's trying. It's hard on me because Adam is abusive to me. I got to hand him a beating once in a while.
MCA: And it's hard for me to watch that. It's hard for me to watch the pain between these two.
Mike D: We've been hanging since before I was 15.
Ad-rock: And we basically have the same friends we've had since then.
Mike D: I don't know what that means. Maybe arrested development.
This film seems primed for the special DVD treatment.
Mike D: There are some important special features. There is a barbecue battle royale on the DVD that is going to be very important viewing material. It's a barbecue battle that spans the globe. The inception of it starts in Australia and carries across the pond and takes place in Los Angeles.