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"[W]e don't want to do anything that is ever going to embarrass our fans. That's why over the years we've turned down so many offers from companies who want us to endorse their products." -- Edge |
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"[W]e don't want to do anything that is ever going to embarrass our fans. That's why over the years we've turned down so many offers from companies who want us to endorse their products." -- Edge |
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Transcript: Interview With Mark Neale, Director of 'No Maps for These Territories'
@U2,
April 24, 2002
AP: What do you do and how did you get involved in it?
MN: I'm a film maker. I started making little home movies in the mid-Eighties. I made a couple of music videos for my own band, which was called the Indicators, and for a couple of friends' bands. But I didn't really want to do music videos; I was more interested in other things. I hadn't been to film school. I studied foreign languages at university, I lived in Spain and as a teenager moved around in Europe. 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 really 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. [Before 1990 I was] a dispatch writer in London to make money, doing a bit of freelance copywriting -- my girlfriend who became my wife worked in an ad agency. I wanted to write as well, so I was happy to write advertisments for money. I worked on a TV series called Buzz which was on Channel 4 in the U.K. and MTV here 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 was this guy, 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 very 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, three to five minute pieces about Syd Mead, who's the guy who designed Blade Runner, or it 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. And that's when I met various people who worked with me on [No Maps for These Territories], the guys called tomandandy who did the music for a lot of the soundtrack, I met them; Mark Pellington, obviously I met him, he was the executive producer who put some money into No Maps to get it going -- one of the executive producers; another is a guy called Chris Paine who was Buzz's Prague correspondent. He actually went off after that and became a dot-com tycoon, he actually is one of the ones who got it right, built a company that worked and sold it. He was fortunately around to save me when I needed money for the Gibson film! A lot of that film, the people to do with it, were all friends whom I've known for years. The other one is a guy called Grant Gee, who is a very interesting character. He has gone on to direct work including a film about the band Radiohead called Meeting People is Easy... After that me and Grant actually worked together for several years. We got this great gig after Buzz which was multimedia in the old sense of the world, 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 by -- inasmuch as it was scripted -- by William Gibson. I used little excerpts from it because what he actually wrote was like an extended prose poem. He always referred to it as a kind of Reader's Digest compression of his main idea, his central idea. It's a wonderful poem. It's a long poem about six or seven pages long which, a bit like Buzz, broke down into themes. So what we made, because it was for the Expo, was one of those things that's very traditional for the Expo: you would put on a show that was about the world that we live in. It was sort of kaleidoscopic, global, somehow [a] kind of compendium of the world as it is or as it was then. We did that but it was put through our own modus operandi, this self-taught mixture of manipulated sound and image and idea. This thing was great, it had a soundtrack that was produced by John Paul Jones from Led Zeppelin, Peter Gabriel did a couple tracks, tomandandy did some of the music, and then there was a theatre group called La Fura Dels Baus -- they're from Barcelona which is where I used to live. The thing that probably most people have seen of theirs was the opening ceremony for the '92 Olympics in Spain. They're a very crazy theatre group who took street carnival and combined it with industrial locations and [they] create ritualized symbolic performances that examine very elemental ideas, like the relationship between the boss and the workers or between man and woman or between man and God. They're really terrifying actually; during the show they knock down walls, cut cars in half, fire rockets over your head -- it was this mass multimedia folly. I thought 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. But it was quite wonderful. We were the linchpins a bit because I was the spanish speaker. I could co-ordinate between the Spanish people and the English speakers. Grant and I [put] together a five-screen, 45-minute film which was a bit like Buzz on five screens. It broke down into maybe ten pieces. The first was about anxiety. It was a five-minute techno music track with images that showed how things have accelerated from the days of horseback. While our images ran on the screen, the Fura Dels Baus people would charge through the audience...on these twenty-foot diameter hamster wheels. They had men in business suits with briefcases running on these hamster wheels to roll through the audience yelling "get out of the way!" And the music was incredibly loud. So it was quite overwhelming. But there were gentle bits talking about love and loss... So I got to know [Gibson] a bit then, and then I worked with U2. I'm pretty sure I introduced him to them, because I don't think they'd really spoke to that point, and I was very into him. Brian Eno had seen the show Memory Palace. What happened was that 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 as being the writer and got to direct some little pieces for it. But Kevin Godley directed the whole show. And yeah -- I think the fact that Brian Eno happened to have seen Memory Palace in Barcelona definitely helped... Because of that I ended up then doing some stuff for Zoo TV for the screens and everything. I invented the Video Confessional. That was my favorite thing! And it was very interesting to do that kind of thing, not just manipulating pictures but how could you use media in creative ways. I did the opening for when it 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 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. Video art for -- I honestly can't remember -- but for three or four songs, depending on which they were doing. And my favorite thing that I did for the TV show [was] a newsreader who spoke complete gibberish. 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. The best bit was that guy saying "I'm a married mother with three children", "I'm a married mother with three children successfully transplanted to a blind person..." -- I can't remember. 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'm 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 one was when we heard that William Shatner -- y'know, Captain Kirk? -- was coming to visit the show and 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. And 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." Goes on like that. I wrote that. AP: And all the time I thought it was Bono being the genius. MN: Naturally, one would assume that. And he did change it of course -- he put in his own thing -- but he really liked it. 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. It was a very interesting job to have. And like I say William Gibson showed up and I think they got quite friendly and although I wasn't around at that point, I know they met several times. I think he ended up interviewing them, interviewing Bono and Edge, for Details or one of those magazines. AP: So let's talk about Bono and Edge appearing in No Maps for These Territories. MN: The way it actually started was that I asked Edge if he would do any music for the film. 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 the fact is there are very few people other than Gibson in the film...It's partly because [Edge's] music's in there, partly because they are U2, and it's a very good way of attracting people's attention. And 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 loosely, 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. AP: Bono did read a part about Rez in the movie. MN: Yeah, exactly. I just couldn't resist it. Music and rock 'n' roll is a part of Gibson's books, there is a very rock 'n' roll, adolescent side to it all. So it didn't seem too out of place. But the bottom line is that they're 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...The bottom line is that they were good enough to do it for me as well, they were really happy to do it. Obviously 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. AP: The dominant image in No Maps is of William Gibson chatting about technology or drugs or Civil War-era porn while sitting in the back seat of a car. The landscape zooms by -- except sometimes the landscape stops and rewinds, or goes in two different directions in neighboring windows. How did you come up with this disorienting visual metaphor? N: From my own personal disorientation, basically, because I'd just moved out here to L.A. four years ago. I was definitely in a suitable frame of mind to make a film called No Maps for These Territories disoriented. The way we ended up in a car was I was simply trying to find a way to interview him that he would be comfortable with. 1995 is probably when I started talking to him about making a documentary; he had told me that people were asking him why there wasn't one. He's just a very elusive figure; although he likes to point out that he's not a recluse, he's definitely elusive and had eluded that kind of documentation for a long time. He did the same thing to me. Although he'd talked about doing it, he's really hard to pin down; it actually took me longer to get Gibson than it did to get Bono and Edge! I had been talking to him in '95 and didn't start shooting until '99... I actually had different scenarios that I pitched to him as ways to frame him and tell his story, and none of them quite worked for him. I wound up sitting in my car -- 'cause that's my car that it was all shot in -- and I started thinking, "Well, with not very much money I could put cameras in this car. Maybe he would just be okay with that...maybe I could drive him around and just see if that works." And that's how it started, it was just empirical. I put a couple of little cameras in the car and drove him around L.A. for a couple of days in between other meetings that he was doing. I set my cameras up so that I would be able to put other things in the windows. I knew that I was going to play around with it in post-production... What worked about it was that it's a kind of confessional environment. He's not somebody who's very comfortable with face-to-face conversation...I was sitting in the front driving, there was no one else in the car, he was sitting in the back, being chauffered around, there was stuff to look at and listen to, there was a stereo in the car, I'd videotape little things for him to look at on a monitor. It seemed like a good, self-contained environment to put him in which had stimuli whether you planned them or there were just random things outside that would make the conversation flow. That was the main purpose: to make the conversation flow. That's what worked. Even people -- like his wife -- who've seen it said, "he hasn't told me some of the things he says there!" AP: A major theme of the movie is life in a mediated environment, how we all live in a mediated world now. How would you address the question of "Who mediates the environment?" MN: Now that I've finished the film I think about that a lot more. I realize how hard it is to get a piece of media out there if you don't have the hookup with Time/Warner/AOL or whatever. On the one hand I'm not surprised to learn how hard it is to get media distributed, but it is probably harder than I thought, and more controlled by purely commercial enterprises...But on the other hand I'm very, very happy that I never got a deal with any company to make the thing because me and my friends own it. Right now we don't have any distribution, so anyone who wants to buy it can go to the website and order it and get a DVD. We'll take it from this grassroots level and see how far we can go with it ourselves... The film's good. The film holds up; it's an honest portrait of the guy largely because he's been so honest in it. I'm really excited to see how we can spread the word and how far it can go. I'm not in a huge hurry with it; I don't think he's in a huge hurry anymore with what he's doing. I look at it as a longterm thing. I feel like that's how my view has changed. The idea of making something and creating a splash suddenly, everywhere, so everyone notices it, is gone. What instead is there is the idea that over time the ripples can spread... And the other thing...I'm generally appalled at what people are being sold and what they're buying and what they're thinking. I don't know; in the back of my mind I do have the idea that we have, the English people, the Europeans, we have somewhere to retreat to, but probably when we go there it'll be just like America. England has changed a lot in the last few years in that way. It's things like cellphones and Gameboys and that sort that seem really, really powerful. And I've just been in Japan: it's amazing, everyone is permanently messaging each other and looking at little pictures on their little video screens on their cell phones. It's like what Gibson says -- I don't understand it, it's so fast. It seems to exist because it can, but I don't know in the service of what. One of the reviewers wrote in Salon.com that maybe the future isn't as frightening as we thought, but I think in a lot of ways it is. I don't know how much the media is responsible for it and how much is just human nature. © @U2/Pancella, 2002.
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