film for cutie, a death cab documentary

Sometimes it’s best (and maybe this especially applies to documentaries) to start a film with a question. By that I mean a concept or the seed of a story that blossoms from asking instead of setting out with certainity. Before you set out knowing exactly what you’re going to say, you find a set of circumstances, collisions, happenings – and later in finding them, recording them, and editing them into a narrative the answer becomes clear to the question. It’s an act of filmmaking as inquiry, a dialogue with the world at large.

I see a documentary in the company of death cab for cutie as one that begins with a series of questions, and in journeying we discover what the answer might be, what clues the terrain holds, what stories people have to tell about that question.

For me the principal question I’d like to ask is one we’re obsessed with in America, one that must obsess all artists or cultural essayists. In a cultural environment that engages with corporatism and complex marketing and the issues of control therein, is there such a thing as taking a stand against “selling out”. Is there an honest act of authenticity in doing so, beyond mere philosophy as fashion statement? For those people out there who choose to disassociate themselves with what they’re told they’re supposed to interact with culturally (to the point where it seems almost some sort of lesser crime against America to not choose to go see Pearl Harbor or buy the new Britney Spears album or find Madonna provocative for the 8 billionth time), is there an effect on their lives that is positive, that isn’t merely another mutagenic version of the same recursive compulsion to be a consumer? Are they really better off, is there a real essence there of honesty that’s lacking otherwise? That’s the complex wording, but essentially it’s to chronicle a band that has chosen not to accept what’s considered the path to success in America, who have found a different kind of success, an engagement, a proximity, an intimacy with their audience.

There’s this incredible passage in William Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties, in which the closest thing to a villain discusses what’s happened at large in America that’s deprived it of a necessary cultural dialogue. The character, a PR executive who has more power to influence elections and advertising campaigns than the most powerful celebrity, remarks upon the lack of “interstitial territories”. He defines them as a necessary underground element in human culture that usually has sexual, political, and philosophical values outside the pale of the status quo, a sort of laboratory for new human values and advancements in our essential collective philosophy. At first they were geographical – like Paris’ Left Bank in the 40s, New York in the 50’s, San Francisco in the 60’s, and so on. They’d blossom, challenge notions, then die out naturally as they became integrated into the norm, changing it for the better.

The problem was the marketing people figured out when they’d happen before they had a chance to naturally do what they were supposed to, and strip mined them as just another commodity. They couldn’t die or become part of the larger world. They became a fashion, a pose. I don’t think I need to go any further for anyone to not recognize that this has come to pass.

But I also believe that cultural forces sometimes follow the laws of physics, and there’s been an equal and opposite reaction. The new interstitial territories aren’t geographic. They’re the sixteen year old in Sweden accessible twenty four hours a day in an Internet chat room who defeats the MPAA’s DVD encryption, the music fan who can instantly tell two hundred people about the concert they just went to. The marketers and the music execs are running scared, and they fucking well should be. One thing I definitely know I can show without a question is that there are other ways, options, choices. Hopefully the documentary will show how difficult it is to make those choices in a world largely mediated to prevent them from being made.

And even more than that it’s to chronicle the fans. It’s to look at their lives, to chronicle their obsession and love and need for music like death cab for cutie’s. To document that particular time in your life, hovering in or at the end of adolescence (and some older people who never grow out of it) where pop music is like oxygen, a necessary component where culture is like atmosphere, all pervasive. I think you’d be hard pressed to find anybody who at one time in their life wasn’t hung up on at least one band or musician, who needed their words and their music and put them into their lives with feverish intent. I want to examine that in its most naked form. Above all else, to do it nonjudgmentally, unironically, without cynicism. If there are any certainties in life, one is that everyone is psychologically distinguishable and rich enough that one person’s inanities are another’s epiphanies. I want to give a voice to one form of that, to share it, to get to the heart of the little crazy passions there, that you might find in some suburban kid in Grand Rapids or a class valedictorian in upstate New York.

This is the essential thing to capture and film. Make no mistake, I don’t want to make a documentary like other tour documentaries. I don’t want to follow the band around 24/7 and attempt to retread truths everyone knows in the postmodern world about what it’s like being in a band, or just simple hero worship. No offense to Death Cab, but I don’t want to do some documentary that fixates on their image and experience as rock stars, nor fill up hours of material with interviews on topics that we all know about. If anything, I want to find out from the band not how they deal with groupies or the monotonies of touring, but instead something deeper and more primal in human experience. What do you dream about on the road? What in your childhood, not your adolescence, do you think brought you to becoming a musician? It would necessitate a clinical filmmaking approach towards the band, so that they become rather than objects of idolatry, objects of humanity.

More importantly, the documentary would focus on the fans. Maybe the band could put me in touch with particular people they’ve been in contact with, arrange a meeting with them. As the band rolls into town to prepare their show, the film crew following head straight into town to meet a preselected fan and record as much as possible their life, undiluted and direct. What they eat before the show, where they hang out in town, meeting their boyfriend – any level of interaction to show their humanity. We don’t fill the documentary with concert footage, but rather focus on the audience. They become the film and its heart, an extended ode to the audience, to the lives that make up and give it its power.

Nitty gritty time: this documentary would be shot on Digital Video, which goes without saying. It’s ease of shooting, portability, lack of complex maintenance, and cost are all perfect for this project. But I believe there’s ways around the typical look of Digital Video to give this documentary a different look than what we’re accustomed to. I believe audiences have become inured to naturalism that seems lazy and mundane, saturated in the documentaries made that have no discerning style or aesthetic.

We’d approach this film something more like an Errol Morris documentary. Exquisite framing, smooth dolly shots. We can’t light like a Kubrick film, but we can move and frame the camera like one. We take care with our images rather than walking around with the record button on.

But something essential is that this style should be cinematic, but not overtly stylistic to the point where we make judgments on people. No low or high angles, no arch or fey editing to mock our subjects. Ever since Michael Moore’s (and I don’t blame him for this) documentaries we’ve had films that mock their subjects without them being aware of it. And that is exactly the opposite of what we want to do (an excellent example of this would be Mike Mills’ – who has directed very stylized videos for Air, Pulp, and R.E.M. - documentary Paperboys which might be an examination of middle class suburbia but never stoops to superiority).

As an example… We find a subject who’s going to tell us about why they care about Death Cab. We ask them to think of a location that’s important and local to them. We frame them dead center in our image and slowly push in on them as they introduce themselves. We cut to handheld camera following them around their house. We cut from that to slow motion footage of them at a concert, enjoying themselves. We treat our subjects with respect, even despite what they might be saying. We let the audience of the film make those calls.

It’s not to say why or how this is, but rather to say – this happens. It really does. Draw your own conclusions. There is no book without a reader. There’s no storyteller without a listener. There’s no pop musician without an audience. They’re one and the same parts of a complex equation

The film will also be an exploration and chronicle of an American landscape that’s changing. The proliferation of one level concrete shopping arcades. The lack of parks and public places for young people to gather. How difficult it is for them to find outlets in the media that tell them about music like this, how the system conspires against the band and the audience when it comes to all audience shows.

In other words, how inescapable it has become, how blank the landscape has become, how little choice or space for interaction there is. How in such circumstances unusual passions can still go on, people will still dream and seek reverie even when their cultural landscape is a Wal Mart and a job at a fast food chain.

Through my eyes, which have spent very little time in the U.S. for the past seven years, I hope it’s as new and open to me as I imagine it will be. Every time I go back to the U.S. the thing that consistently confuses me is that for all our riches, which are substantial and wonderful and really something to be proud of – so many of us are so fucking unhappy. I don’t think it has to be this way, and I don’t think any sane, rational American should think otherwise. We’re just not addressing loudly enough what our real problems are.

That’s the film I’d like to make. That’s the film I’d like for Death Cab to be able to give their fans, give them a voice. Those are some questions I’d like answered, or at least have the temerity to ask them. Maybe the answer will be something different. Maybe this universe will throw up death cab ascendant, and we were lucky enough to be able to record it. It could be for the worse, but we’ll be there to examine what happens then. In any case, one can’t shape a documentary like a story, so we’ll set out to find whatever it is.

I’ve no illusions of using this as opportunity to live out some twisted rock n roll fantasy of my own. Those aren’t and never could be my intentions. It would be one big real love letter to pop music and what affect it has in your life, free from manipulation or the hues of nostalgia. It’d be a film that maybe children could show their parents at a time in their life to give some definitive answer as to why they are the way they are.

Or for that matter, something for the members of Death Cab to show their children, for the same reason. In a worst case scenario, then, not too bad.