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"We've never been cool; we're hot. Irish people are Italians who can't dress, Jamaicans who can't dance." -- Bono |
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"We've never been cool; we're hot. Irish people are Italians who can't dress, Jamaicans who can't dance." -- Bono |
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Mark Neale: Mapmaker
@U2,
April 24, 2002
The movie opens with hyperkinetic images set to a mercilessly fast rhythm -- streets, rotating cigarette lighters, power lines, arcade games, Bono's face on an outdoor video screen. The Edge is the first person to speak at any length. Appearing on a console by a car dashboard, he says, "I think the question on a lot of people's minds right now is simply 'What the hell is going on?' "
What's going on, in this context at least, is No Maps for These Territories, a documentary about the science fiction writer William Gibson. Gibson is the man who coined the term "cyberspace"; his book Neuromancer helped create a mythology of the wired world. To understand how the singer and guitarist of a certain Irish rock band got involved in a film about a Vancouver-based writer, we're going to have to talk about Spanish theatre troupes, Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," confessionals and William Shatner. In short, we're going to have to talk to the documentary's director, Mark Neale. "The way it actually started was that I asked Edge if he would do any music for the film," the transplanted Englishman says in a call from his home base in L.A. "And he did, he gave me a track for it. But then we got to talking about Gibson. It didn't seem [there was] anything unnatural about interviewing them...but it's partly because [Edge's] music's in there, and partly because they are U2, and it's a very good way of attracting people's attention. "Then there's the fact that within [Gibson's] fiction...in Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties, there is this band Lo/Rez who are very loosely modelled on or inspired by U2. Gibson obviously took from his experience with U2 to help create the characters of these huge rock stars. "Music and rock 'n' roll is a part of Gibson's books, there is a very rock 'n' roll, adolescent side to it all and so it didn't seem too out of place. But the bottom line is that [Bono and Edge] are there because I could get them in there. And it worked -- I would've felt very uncomfortable if you suddenly cut away to Bono sitting in his limo, but the fact that he appears on a video wall -- it's like, that's where Bono lives." Neale would know. He's responsible for some of the most memorable elements of Zoo TV, having been brought into that project in 1992. His path to Zoo TV, and to the world of filmmaking, was a circuitous one. In the mid-Eighties he was making music videos for his own band (the Indicators) and for friends' bands, but he didn't really want to do music videos. "I always was more drawn to what was Out There rather than what was going on in London or in the music business. I was always looking for some sort of adventure, really. I tried to become a film director not knowing how. I didn't make any money -- which I suppose is one way of defining whether you're professional or not -- until the early '90s." That was when he did a series called Buzz, which aired on Channel 4 in the U.K. and on MTV in the U.S. "when MTV was more interestingly out of control. That was partly how I got involved with U2 -- because they were fans of that series. I was one of three directors, and the other two were Americans. One's called Mark Pellington, he's a fairly well-known feature film director now, he just directed The Mothman Prophecies. With @U2 you would know him anyway, he was involved in Zoo TV and created video art for that. And actually all three of us -- me and Mark Pellington and the other director at Buzz, this madman called Jon Klein who was inspirational but kind of borderline psychotic -- we all worked on Zoo TV at different times. Jon was the first; he co-directed the video for "The Fly" with a director called Ritchie Smyth who was Irish. "So I did [Buzz] and that was interesting because the series was very conceptual. We made thirteen half-hour programs and each one was on a theme like 'love' or 'philosophy' or 'the future' -- completely, ludicrously overambitious...But we made these interesting little pieces; nowadays in the climate of digital video, people would actually call what we were doing then digital short films. [There were] three- to five-minute pieces; one might be...about a crazy Catalan theatre group that reinvents theatre, or about a poet, or whatever. There were just all these short pieces that would be linked together 'cause there was some tenuous link to do with a supposed 'theme.' I really liked doing that -- and that's when I met William Gibson." Gibson was the subject of one of the Buzz pieces. He was also involved in Neale's next big project -- an extravaganza Neale worked on with Grant Gee, who later directed the Radiohead documentary Meeting People is Easy. "We got this great gig after Buzz which was multimedia in the old sense of the word in that it was a combination of projected images and live theatre and pre-recorded music. [It was] for the Expo in Spain in Seville in 1992. So in 1990 I did Buzz, in '91 we spent a year making this thing which opened in Barcelona and then went to Seville early in '92. It was called Memory Palace and it was scripted -- inasmuch as it was scripted -- by William Gibson..." He goes on to describe a show which involves, among other things, members of a Spanish theatre group (La Fura dels Baus) dressed in business suits moving through the crowd inside 20-foot-tall hamster wheels yelling "Get out of the way!" while loud techno music blares. "It was this mass multimedia folly. I thought [then] that this kind of thing might happen all the time to me, but it's only when you get a combination of, y'know, a lot of money and Spanish people that you can do something like that." Unless, of course, you're a big famous mega-rich rock band. Enter U2. "There was a two-hour TV special made about Zoo TV in '92. I got to work on that because it was produced by Initial Television in London who produced the series Buzz. But also when Initial put me up, the Edge was looking for a writer to come up with some ideas for how they could expand Zoo TV into a TV show and actually have some conceptual pieces, or some scripted things with actors and so on, as well as the concert. I got this gig being the writer and got to direct some little pieces for it. Kevin Godley directed the whole show. I think the fact that Brian Eno happened to have seen Memory Palace in Barcelona definitely helped." The TV special was made around Thanksgiving of 1992. In America it was shown on Fox, which at the time was a new network trying to establish itself as cutting edge. Fox probably got more than it bargained for. This subversive little program featured President Bush chanting "We will, we will rock you"; a rock guitarist comparing the Gulf War to a videogame; and beat poet William Burroughs lamenting the U.S. as "the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams." Oh, yes -- there was also a U2 concert. But the concert itself kept getting invaded by the TV program. Images of the performance were interspliced with absurd streams of data or soundbites by, say, Timothy Leary. The stage was also literally invaded. Neale, describing what contributions he made to the program, says, "I wrote stuff for Bono to say...There's this sort of poem that he recites which was called 'The Creed of Everything.' In the TV show there's a reporter who bursts on stage at one point and asks him what he believes in: 'I believe in the sky above me and the silver shoes at my feet, I believe in poetry, electricity, and cheap cosmetics.' It goes on like that. I wrote that." "And all the time I thought it was Bono being the genius," I tell him. "Naturally, one would assume that," he answers. "And he did change it of course -- he put in his own thing -- but he really liked it. (@U2 note: Bono is responsible for the "I have a vision! Television!" lines, in case you were wondering. For more on "The Creed of Everything," see the Postscript below.) And that was actually the first thing I wrote for [the TV show]. 'Cause as I was looking at it, I was thinking, 'Well, what could I possibly write that might get used?' So I thought, 'Maybe I could write something for Bono to say.' I have to say he did take it and make it his own but substantially it was what I wrote." Just before or after commercial breaks during the program, the opening guitar squonks of "Until the End of the World" would sound and a news desk would appear. That was Neale's doing as well. "My favorite thing that I did for the TV show [was] a newsreader who spoke complete gibberish." (An example, all spoken in a neutral, "I'm reading from a TelePrompter" anchorperson tone: "The category is athletics. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1901 with a free game card, the antibiotics arrived too late for thousands of satisfied motorists; an all-night vigil by protestors met with a year's free subscription. Call toll-free for ex-government salad sandwiches with a choice of fumenngs.")" He's mine. That made me laugh. "I remember how I sat at home and flipped through channels and wrote down bits and pieces that I heard and then reworked it. I loved that; it was so funny...I remember arriving where we were casting it and there were all these guys outside the hotel in Florida reciting this stuff. I just remember walking past this guy who was reciting this and then afterwards, after we'd auditioned him, he said, 'I'm not sure if I can say this, but I have to say that I'm finding a good deal of humor in it and perhaps it wasn't intended?' "I was hired to be subversive and foolish. It was a lot of fun. It was very, very stressful as well; it was horribly stressful. The worst was when we heard that William Shatner -- y'know, Captain Kirk? -- was coming to visit the show. They wanted to shoot him visiting the Underworld -- where all the gear was under the stage -- which looked very cyber and futuristic. They wanted him, in character as Captain Kirk, to walk around talking about where he might be as if he'd just beamed down...' But you have to write it in such a way that he doesn't realize that he's Captain Kirk...' That's the worst stress I've ever felt, where you know it's just impossible but you've gotta write something. Then of course in the end it couldn't be done, but I had a go. In other ways it was great." Neale invented the animal-print Video Confessional ("That was my favorite thing!") where concertgoers could confess their sins, sing a song, or record gooey love poems to their girlfriends. The best of these were aired on the big screens during the concert, before the encores. Those whose only experience with Zoo TV is the Live in Sydney video are probably very familiar with Neale's visual stamp on that concert: "I did the opening for when [Zoo TV] became Zooropa. I did the opening sequence which began with loops of Leni Riefenstahl footage which an outfit called the Emergency Broadcast Network put together. After a minute or so it segues into this sort of multiscreened thing with Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy' -- I did all of that. [The part] which begins with 'what do you want?' -- that was mine." He thinks he is probably responsible for introducing U2 to William Gibson. The rock stars and the science fiction author got to be friendly; Gibson recorded pieces for possible use in Zoo TV and later interviewed Bono and Edge for Details magazine. So when Neale was putting together a documentary on Gibson, he says they were happy to sign on. "There were logistical problems, just trying to find time, trying to find a way to hook up, but they were really happy to do it. And they do read books, they're literary guys, and Irish people love storytelling and all that, and it never felt forced or weird." Bono and Edge's appearance in No Maps for These Territories is in a line with other instances where they seem to break the mold of rockstar sightings -- Bono with the Pope, say, or Edge at Stephen Hawking's birthday party. Maybe this really is U2's world. Or maybe it just seems that way since they keep associating themselves with bright lights, people whose job is to examine and critique the state of the culture. William Gibson is one such person, described by writer Jack Womack in No Maps as "a visionary": "I quite honestly feel, if he had not written Neuromancer when he did, that the world as it is, and much more, the world which is to come, would not have taken place in the exact way it has." He has helped, through his fiction, to frame the way people think of our current technological revolution. His knack is highlighting what might otherwise be unquestioned -- in Idoru, for instance, his focus is on what purpose "celebrity" serves, and whether it is necessary for the celebrity to exist in the actual (as opposed to the virtual) world. It's a question U2 must certainly ponder. In No Maps for These Territories, the director shows Bono at his perch on the video wall reading a description of Gibson's fictional rock 'n' roll singer: "Rez was a law unto himself, very possibly the last of the pre-post-human megastars." Neale laughs when I bring this scene up: "I just couldn't resist it." Find out more about the William Gibson documentary No Maps for These Territories at nomaps.com. Postscript From an email from Mark Neale after this article was written: "Please make sure that you describe 'The Creed of Everything' as something I co-wrote with Bono. The real fun of that piece, after Bono's positive response to my first draft, was the subsequent collaboration with him and, as I recall, Willie Williams, in developing it into its final form. © @U2/Pancella, 2002.
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