Interviews with Talking Heads Jerry Harrison & Chris Frantz – HuffPost 11.4.09
Mike Ragogna: How do you feel about having a 25th anniversary Blu-ray edition of the movie?
Chris Frantz: I’m very pleased to still be able to enjoy it! Who knew that the movie would have such a lasting impact, and I’m very pleased that we made it in the first place. Not only does it hold up very well, but I would say it’s a really good work of art.
MR: Everything about it seems to be from an artistic angle.
CF: Well, the first band David Byrne and I had together was called The Artistics, and we kind of tried to carry that concept through to Talking Heads. The amazing thing about the movie is that everybody did such a wonderful job on it, and not only the music. The performers are fantastic, but our Talking Heads crew and the film crew were like Trojan warriors. They held up for three days of shooting, and they did a wonderful job.
MR: One of the most beautiful things about Stop Making Sense is how it builds with a minimalist approach. How scripted was the show in order to pull off the vision?
Jerry Harrison: Well, the set was the same every night, and what you see in the film is really what we performed every day. There wasn’t anything done in particular for the film other than there was a terrific director of photography who added lighting to what we had as our normal stage lighting. But the basic look of it with the rear slide projections, that was all done every night, as well as the stage being built by (the adding of) musician after musician.
CF: The director of photography, Jordon Croneweth, was fantastic. We had been very impressed with his work in the movie Blade Runner.
MR: That build is the thing that many people, at the time, said that was what they liked best, how the film never stopped drawing you in.
JH: I agree. I think that one of the things–I really would give David credit for this–was that it was done with “simple tools,” so it doesn’t have a particular technology dating when we made it. Like if you go to big concerts now, they’re going to be very defined by the current state of the art in video projection technology. You’re in L.A., did you get to see U2 in the Rose Bowl?
MR: Yeah, loved it.
JH: It was fantastic, and the video screens were just amazing. But if that’s going to be filmed, that video screen sets the concert in this time period as opposed to, say, five years ago when a U2 tour or any tour showed there was a certain possibility for technology. Stop Making Sense, I would say, is kind of timeless. Its technologies are something that were largely available in the 1920s, with the exception of the rear screen projection. It all has a very analog feeling with basically slides being projected. And because of that, there’s nothing that seems to be rooted in a particular technology of the time period, and therefore, it gives it a more timeless and long-lasting power.
MR: Right, including the costumes that, though they may reflect a time period themselves, weren’t a new technology, just good ol’ staging.
JH: Yes, and that was very deliberate. Now with the Talking Heads, we always wore clothes that looked like we could be caddies on a golf course. We were deliberately trying to not have those kind of things be so flamboyant that they took away from the music and the simple artistic statement.
MR: How did you decide what would be captured on film from your concerts?
CF: Jonathan Demme’s girlfriend at the time was named Sandy McCloud, and she was a filmmaker in her own right, and is to this day. Jonathan was busy doing some other movie called Swing Shift with Goldie Hawn, so he wasn’t able to go to all the shows. But prior to the shooting, Sandy McCloud must have gone to twenty of our shows, and she took quite extensive notes on direction, like who does what at different times during the set. She was able to convey that to Jonathan who was then able to direct the cameras. One great thing about that movie is the shots are very long. The camera lingers on the different performers to the extent that you really feel like you’re getting to know the people. That was quite different than many other concert films that were the visual equivalent of a tossed salad where there’s a lot of fast cutting, and a lot of close-ups of people’s fingers and stuff like that. Stop Making Sense is quite the opposite, I think.
MR: Even the editing seemed to be minimal, giving it a real graceful flow.
CF: I think you’re right about that. The editor, Lisa Day, did a wonderful job. Like I said before, everyone involved did great work, from the cameras to the editing to the sound recording. You know, that was one of the first films ever made with digital recording.
MR: What are your favorite group performances from the film?
CF: There are so many favorites to chose from, but I’m especially fond of “Take Me To The River.” That’s one of those songs that you never get tired of playing. It was written by Al Green, and it’s the only song Talking Heads recorded that we didn’t write ourselves. I’m really glad we did it, it’s a genius song. It’s religious in a really transcendent, gospel way, and it worked really well at the end of the set there. And, of course, I love “Genius Of Love.” The guitar player, Alex Weir, said to me once, “You know, my people come to the show to hear ‘Genius Of Love.’ That’s one of the high points to me. And I’ve got to say, the song “This Must Be The Place (Naïve Melody)” is to die for it’s so good.
MR: The inclusion of “Genius Of Love” was a nice nod to the Tom Tom Club side project.
JH: Well, there are a couple of things about that. “Genius Of Love,” of our combined work, was one of our most successful songs of the time. It seemed that it should be included. And it gave David a chance to change into the “big suit.”
CF: Yeah, David needed a chance to change into his “big suit,” that’s why we did it. In 1983, the song was still huge in all the clubs and all the basketball courts across America. And it was a real contrast to the rest of the set. I know that critic Pauline Kael was kind of harsh about it, she felt it didn’t work with the rest of the set. But I thought, on the contrary, it’s like a little vacation in the middle of a Talking Heads set. It was a little sorbet.
MR: How involved was the band in the Blu-ray reconstruction?
JH: I was the one who was the most involved, mainly by just checking it out, and asking questions. Jonathan Demme and I got advanced versions, so I went through it comparing it to the DVD, both for sound and picture.
MR: So you were included after the fact.
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JH: I wished I’d been involved from the very beginning because, with ET Thorngren, we did all the remixes of all the Talking Heads albums in 5.1 that were put out on DVD audio. So I would have actually thought it would have been thrilling to remix it, although I don’t think there would have been room to have multiple formats.
MR: Technically, it’s in 5.1.
JH: Yeah it’s got two 5.1 mixes of the stereo mix, and it’s in DTS 96 which is great, but I had some questions in what they had done in the sampling rate. No matter, it still sounds much better, so it’s a big improvement and it’s great.
MR: So you feel there was a significant upgrade in the audio as well as the video?
JH: With the new dolby and DTS formats, you have something that’s comparable to what DVD audio or SACD was. Potentially, it’s a wonderful new world of home entertainment, you know? I think we live in a world where everyone’s become so obsessed by the convenience of listening to things on their computer and iPod. There are friends of my kids, they talk about how many songs they have rather than how good the songs sound. I think people have a tendency to go for ubiquity rather than quality, so they don’t care that they have highly digitally compressed versions. So, it’s exciting for me to have something like Blu-ray where it’s all about trying to raise the quality, and I wish there was more of it.
MR: Who was the force behind it coming out on DVD initially?
JH: It was me that put it together to come out on DVD earlier.
MR: Jerry, you oversaw the initial element transfers?
JH: That’s right. And Jonathan got involved with the picture, and I left that up to him. But the deal was the result of a friend of mine, David Beal, who was running Palm Pictures, then I put the whole thing in motion. Then David (Byrne) and Jonathan and a whole bunch of people got involved.
MR: How would you rate Stop Making Sense with the rest of the Talking Heads catalog?
JH: I would say that if no one had heard of the Talking Heads, it would be the first thing I would point them to because, with the exception of the later records, it’s very singular. As great as our records are, I think our performances often raise things to a higher level. That being said, thinking back, I think Remain In Light will probably go down as the most original album we ever did. I think it changed the way people thought about making music.
MR: When you watched the final cut back in the day, did the band and Jonathan sense this was going to be one of the great rock films?
JH: Yes. One of my goals when we did this was to do something that rivaled The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which a theater would start playing at midnight every week on like Saturday night. And it actually did that, it was one of the reasons why it was so important not to insert any interviews because they break the flow of concert movies.
CF: It was very popular in the art film circuit, and also in any theater near a college campus. I was just told by some friends that it was shown late at night in an IMAX theater in Chicago. I would LOVE to see it in IMAX!
MR: Were there endorsements from the art community?
CF: I know that the magazine Art Forum has featured it a few times as something that they highly recommend. It’s a VERY serious art magazine, you know? I know that critics James Walcott and Pauline Kael were crazy about it.
MR: Twenty-five years later, what kind of impact do you think Stop Making Sense has had on the rock world?
CF: After we did that movie, a couple of people in rock ‘n’ roll decided they wanted to make a movie too. Theirs didn’t fare as well as ours did. (laughs) If you don’t have the songs and you don’t have the performances, you can just forget it.
JH: Frankly, I don’t think it’s been surpassed. I think that, really, The Last Waltz and Stop Making Sense hold up as films that people keep coming back to. It’s not that there haven’t been some other great movies, like I think the one Scorsese did with the Stones was a terrific rock movie. But nothing’s come along that just draws you in more. It is very exciting to have it in Blu-ray, where if you have a good 5.1 system, you really can have a more theatre-like experience than you ever could before. It’s really, really satisfying.
MR: So what will Stop Making Sense‘s place be in rock history?
JH: I’d like that it could make as much money as that movie about Miley Cyrus, but I don’t think it’s going to. (laughs) But I do think it will just continue being one of THE rock performance movies.
MR: What do you think Talking Heads’ legacy will be?
CF: My feeling is that it was a wonderful group and I’m so glad that we actually managed to pull it off. Talking Heads was really remarkable in many ways, especially in the fact that we sort of rewrote what a rock band should be like. Great rock bands before us were like The Beatles, The Who, The Rolling Stones–bands that were a great influence on us. But we felt like those guys had already done such a great job at that, there’s no way we can outdo them at what they do. So we came at the rock band thing from a different angle. Thanks to that, a lot of normal kids from the suburbs feel like they don’t have to dress up in leather clothes and stuff like that in order to get their message across. Also, we were one of the few bands who could have artistic credibility and commercial success at the same time. We could really kind of have our cake and eat it too which was remarkable. Especially today, it’s very hard to balance artistic ability with commercial success. You don’t see too much of that.