PLEBA Misc News and Articles #6

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U2 > News > #THESKYDOWN (nonsubscription link)

On Friday Edge and Bono join director Davis Guggenheim to discuss his documentary From The Sky Down, which opens The Toronto International Film Festival this week.

Got a question for Edge, Bono or Davis about the making of Achtung Baby? Post it on Twitter using #THESKYDOWN.

Questions need to be submitted before 12noon Friday (EST) and we can't guarantee how many we'll get through.

You'll be able to tune in for the live chat here on U2.com from about 1.30pm (EST), finishing 2:15 approx.

This is for this Friday, September 9, 2011.
 
DuketheCat said:
U2 > News > #THESKYDOWN (nonsubscription link)

On Friday Edge and Bono join director Davis Guggenheim to discuss his documentary From The Sky Down, which opens The Toronto International Film Festival this week.

Got a question for Edge, Bono or Davis about the making of Achtung Baby? Post it on Twitter using #THESKYDOWN.

Questions need to be submitted before 12noon Friday (EST) and we can't guarantee how many we'll get through.

You'll be able to tune in for the live chat here on U2.com from about 1.30pm (EST), finishing 2:15 approx.

This is for this Friday, September 9, 2011.
Click to expand...

Does this mean he may be in Ottawa on Saturday as rumoured?
 
I'm not freaking, I'm resigned. See, no smileys or anything :)wink:)

If you look their tour record, hasn't it always been a 4 year cycle between tours? (Look at the recent ones-- Elevation to Vertigo to 360) And I'm asking for real, not asking a hypothetical question.

Adam said in Turin (quite some time ago, no doubt), that they dont wan to go away for a long time, so I held dearly to the 2013 tour idea. Well, if Bono is tired however... :shrug:
 
I'm not believing any suggested album/tour dates until I see them, to be honest.

I took "2013" with a very large grain of salt. ;)
 
corianderstem said:
Is two years from now not "a while"?

Why is everyone freaking out about this interview?
Click to expand...

This is exactly what I thought. In the one or two direct quotes the article actually uses, he isn't saying anything we hadn't already figured. A few years is 'a while.' It's not like anyone expected them to start a new tour next year or anything...at least I assume no one expected that. They've had a solid 3 year (at least) gap between tours since the 90's :shrug:

hand0lotion said:
Adam said in Turin (quite some time ago, no doubt), that they dont wan to go away for a long time, so I held dearly to the 2013 tour idea. Well, if Bono is tired however... :shrug:
Click to expand...

This is why I doubt it'll be longer than three years, but you never know. I think late 2013 is a much more likely time frame for an album release than the actual start of the next tour. I mean, it's late 2011 now. And I don't think Bono is tired in a worrisome sense at all. I'm sure right now he's exhausted and needs to sleep for a month, but I don't think he could stay away from doing what he loves until he's physically incapable. And judging from how well he bounced back from the situation he was in last year, it'll be a while before that happens.
 
It makes perfect sense that they need a breather for a few years, anyone can understand that. Besides, Bono "talks" a lot. Ask him again a year from now and I'm sure he'll tell you something different ;)
 
corianderstem said:
I'm not believing any suggested album/tour dates until I see them, to be honest.

I took "2013" with a very large grain of salt. ;)
Click to expand...


Bono's said exactly the same in Brussels.

" I hope we see you soon, because I don't want it to be another 5 years until I see you again. "

But yeah , take a few grains of salt.
Maybe a bag of salt.
 
corianderstem said:
I'm not believing any suggested album/tour dates until I see them, to be honest.

I took "2013" with a very large grain of salt. ;)
Click to expand...

Exactly.

Remember, we were going to get an album before the end of the year. That was said when they released NLOTH. That didn't happen.

Then it was we'd get one around the last leg of the tour. That didn't happen.

I agree that they need time off. OUR BANK ACCOUNTS need time off! :lol: Well, time to save.

Before this, the last I heard, there was to be a knew album by Fall 2012 and tour 2013. Might be more likely a new album in Fall 2013 and tour start in Spring/early Summer 2014.
 
Edge_Orchestra said:
Exactly.

Remember, we were going to get an album before the end of the year. That was said when they released NLOTH. That didn't happen.

Then it was we'd get one around the last leg of the tour. That didn't happen.

I agree that they need time off. OUR BANK ACCOUNTS need time off! :lol: Well, time to save.

Before this, the last I heard, there was to be a knew album by Fall 2012 and tour 2013. Might be more likely a new album in Fall 2013 and tour start in Spring/early Summer 2014.
Click to expand...

This might work for me. I'll have to pop out a kid and get back in GA Line Fighting shape.

I think we just became friends, am I correct?
 
U2 Documentary Depicts Band On Brink Of Breakup

Nick Patch, The Canadian Press
Date: Thu. Sep. 8 2011 1:06 PM ET

TORONTO — Davis Guggenheim discovered one major drawback to directing a documentary about the biggest band in the world. When it comes to U2, everyone's an expert. "The downside of a movie like this is the audience thinks they know the subject -- people feel like they have a relationship already with the band," Guggenheim, 47, said in a telephone interview this week from his Los Angeles office.

"The only way to sort of puncture that is to have tremendous access.... I just kept pushing to go deeper and deeper and deeper, and they went with it, which is really wonderful." The result is "From the Sky Down," which will open the Toronto International Film Festival on Thursday night, the first time a documentary has done so. The film captures the Irish rockers during what should have been a period of triumph following the release of 1987's worldwide smash "The Joshua Tree."

But as Guggenheim's film casts its lens back to that era -- using a mix of fresh footage, new interviews and a wealth of archival clips -- we learn that the band struggled to adapt to its rapidly expanding profile. Bono couldn't adjust to performing in stadiums, the band felt creatively drained and the group's marquee success led to a powerful backlash, particularly after the release of the 1988 documentary and companion live disc, "Rattle and Hum."

As Bono himself puts it in the film, the band appeared on the verge of imploding. And over the course of his lengthy interview process, Guggenheim says it became clear that U2 really was on the brink of breaking up ahead of their seminal 1991 album "Achtung Baby." "Yeah, absolutely," said the affable Oscar-winning director of "An Inconvenient Truth" and "Waiting for Superman." "(Talking to) each one of them, you could just feel it."

And, of course, Guggenheim did talk to each member -- again and again and again, with the intimate one-on-one conversations taking place in such far-flung locales as Buenos Aires, Dublin, Berlin, Santiago and Winnipeg, with the discussions often lasting hours. He also persuaded the band -- which also includes guitarist the Edge, bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. -- to open their Dublin vaults and let him sort through personal footage and photos from the "Achtung" era, as well as the unused dailies from "Rattle and Hum."

All told, how many hours of film did Guggenheim sift through? "I would say it was exactly a gazillion amount," he laughs. Such boundless fact-finding extended to Guggenheim's interviews, too, which yield some candid results. "Nothing was off limits in this movie," says the director. "From the Sky Down" features the sometimes impenetrable U2 personalities at their most pensive and even vulnerable.

Bono is especially open. Consistently self-deprecating and funny, the 51-year-old seems keen on puncturing the band's reputation -- among naysayers -- for political sloganeering and self-serious zealotry. He speaks with a mocking tone of his '91 stylistic reinvention, which saw him don his now-ubiquitous shades, a chic Elvis coiffure and a pair of rock-star leather pants. More seriously, he takes himself to task for his increasingly controlling presence during the 1980s, marvelling that he's not sure how the band tolerated his sometimes-suffocating micromanagement.

In fact, that seems to be the focus of Guggenheim's film -- not the factors that once threatened to split U2 apart, but instead the forces that have somehow kept them together for 35 years and counting. As "From the Sky Down" informs us via an entertaining animated montage, most bands that rocketed to fame in the '80s have since burned up in the atmosphere. But one of the prominent themes of the film is how seriously the quartet treats its bond as a band.

Collaborators explain on-camera that the members of the group are uniquely sensitive to one another's feelings. At one point, Bono dramatically refers to an incident of every-man-for-himself self-interest as a "betrayal" of the band concept. Likewise, in one of the film's most revealing moments, he discusses Edge's divorce as a grave event for the entire band and their families, and not just for his lead guitarist, proving the foursome's unique level of closeness.

"I think at its core, that's what the movie is about -- how do these four individuals defy what feels like a law of physics when it comes to a rock band, the law of physics being that every rock band has to implode or explode," said Guggenheim, who had a prior relationship with the Edge after directing the 2008 rock doc "It Might Get Loud." "They have endured not just as a memory, (but) endured as a thriving, creative force."

"From the Sky Down" also takes pains to explore that ephemeral creative energy, doing so at a critical time in the band's history. When it came time to craft "Achtung Baby," the band really had no idea how to find what they were looking for -- but they knew they wanted something new. With a half-dozen albums of sweeping post-punk behind them, Bono and the Edge began studying electronic pioneers Kraftwerk and even the chart-unfriendly industrial sounds of such groups as KMFDM and Einsturzende Neubauten before retreating to Berlin with producers Brian Eno and Canadian Daniel Lanois.

Eventually, "Achtung Baby" would provide something of a pop revolution, incorporating the thick dance beats that were sweeping the rave and club scenes of the early '90s, combining them with swirling guitars, ear-candy effects and sturdy pop songcraft for a reinvention that would usher in a new era for the group. But upon arriving in the German capital -- itself still fractured and reeling from the fall of the Berlin Wall -- the band was rudderless and adrift.

That changed when they stumbled upon the eventual hit "One," a process of creative discovery that's thrillingly recreated in Guggenheim's film. An archival rehearsal recording reveals the band methodically fumbling toward the song's unforgettable tune, with Bono diligently searching for the melodic sweet spot like a surgeon scanning for the exact place to make an incision.

Guggenheim was a self-described big U2 fan like so many others (though he says this was something of a disadvantage, because "it's better when you make a movie not to be a fan -- it gives you more perspective on things"), so this sequence was a joy for him to watch as well.
"(That) was a massive breakthrough -- when everything was going terrible, they wrote that song in a matter of minutes, and it became sort of the thing that carried them out of this dark time," Guggenheim said. "They each talked about how that magic moment happened so eloquently that it became the centrepiece of the movie."

While the opening slot of a major film festival can be a pressure-packed position for a new film, Guggenheim at least has one potentially stressful event behind him -- the band has already seen the film. Guggenheim screened the movie for the group in July and, once again, they seemed united in their reaction. "I think they were blown away," Guggenheim said.

"I think it does go very personal and very deep. But I think they saw that in it, there was truthfulness to it. And to me, they say it in the movie -- if they're truthful, as long as they're being truthful, that's so important to them."

The Toronto International Film Festival runs until Sept. 18.
Toronto International Film Festival 2011 | CTV.ca U2 documentary depicts band on brink of breakup
I WANT TO SEE THAT FILM SOOO BAAAD!:scream:
 
Oh,another one.
Davis Guggenheim On Filming An Intimate, Honest U2
Special to National Post Sep 8 By Mike Doherty

In Davis Guggenheim’s documentary From the Sky Down, you’ll see the singer of the world’s biggest band glowering and sniping at a cameraman, worrying with his bandmates about persistent screw-ups in shows, and swearing about a stage crew’s incompetence as a worried-looking stylist helps him dress before an encore.

Guggenheim resurrected this footage from discarded dailies for Rattle and Hum, Phil Joanou’s hagiographic 1989 film about U2’s Joshua Tree tour and their “discovery” of American soul and blues music. Had such scenes been included in that film, they’d have drawn out the tension within the band and helped to humanize them; instead, U2 were pilloried in the press for their self-importance. They’d hit a snag on their non-stop road to massive success, and they needed to rethink their music, their image, and what kind of band they wanted to be.

In From the Sky Down, Guggenheim (best known for helming the global-warming doc An Inconvenient Truth) gets the intimate story of insecurity and emotional intensity that Rattle and Hum couldn’t portray, and shows the aftermath, when the four “earnest, po-faced men” (as bassist Adam Clayton describes his band in the film) became cheekier, rhythmically savvier, and even somewhat cool.

Having previously worked with The Edge on the rock-guitar documentary It Might Get Loud, Guggenheim was summoned by U2 to tell the story behind their 1991 album Achtung Baby, as they prepared to play its songs on tour this summer. When conducting research in their Dublin archives, he found the Rattle and Hum footage, which he calls “revelatory.” Over the phone from his L.A. office, the director waxes rhapsodic: “You fall on your knees looking at this stuff — it’s so rare and beautiful. … I spend a lot of time saying ‘no’ to possible movies, but this is an incredible story.” To tell it, however, presented a challenge: “People know the songs too well, and they know the band too well. How do you get to know these people in a different way? How do you hear these songs in a different way?”

Bono has often gone on record with bon mots about U2’s history, including his characterization of Achtung Baby as “the sound of four men cutting down The Joshua Tree” — a phrase he repeats in From the Sky Down. What’s more, much has already been made of how the band, casting around for a sound that would marry Bono and The Edge’s newfound love of electronic music with drummer Larry Mullen’s insistence on song structure, created the song One out of a jam session for Mysterious Ways. Guggenheim adds something new by actually finding the studio tapes of this session and playing them back to the singer and guitarist, whom he reconvenes in Berlin’s Hansa Studios, where they recorded it. Both men smirk at the gaucheness of the early versions, but then their faces light up.

One, an emotional ballad with dark textures and ambiguous lyrics, was a watershed song for U2. Guggenheim shows how it emerged in the studio with archival footage, reminiscences from the band, and illustrative animation; it’s rare even for a music documentary to delve this deeply into the process of creation. By focusing on the song which helped the band find what Clayton calls its new sonic and “spiritual” identity, the director finds his film’s centre, delivering much more than a mere Behind the Music-type tell-all.

That said, he does also draw out elements of tension, both old and new. In one hushed moment, captured during rehearsals this past May in Winnipeg, The Edge plays a solo version of Achtung Baby’s closer, Love Is Blindness, on acoustic guitar, while reflecting in an overdubbed interview on how the breakup of his marriage affected his work on the album. When U2 rehearses together, Bono orders his bandmates around, and The Edge growls back at him.

“Maybe the bands that are less interesting are the ones that have agreed to agree,” Guggenheim muses. “One of the questions the story asks is, ‘How did these guys stay together and still be creative and vital?’ Every other rock band has either imploded or exploded or stayed together out of some sort of painful agreement to get along regardless.”

One gets the impression Guggenheim is somewhat in awe of his subjects — when asked whether he stage-managed the film’s run-through of One with the band sitting in a circle, he says, “God forbid that I’d tell them where to stand.” Operating within the clear boundaries of U2’s commission, the movie doesn’t address the one pertinent question its very existence seems to raise: what impact might revisiting such a fertile period of creativity have on the band now? Guggenheim offers only that “They’re still writing songs; they’re still pushing each other.”

In the wake of Achtung Baby, U2 became increasingly ironic, electronic, over-the-top in their presentation, but after the lukewarm reception of 1997’s Pop, they switched gears again, reconstructing the idea of the rock band that they claimed to have deconstructed. Their latest album, 2009’s No Line on the Horizon, was met with a relatively muted reception. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that on the third leg of their 360° Tour, this summer, they rejigged the playlist to focus more on their early-‘90s work.

At the very least, from this film, we know that they’re still preoccupied with their creative process. And maybe the U2 of 2011, though more affable on-camera than they were 20 years ago, might look back at Achtung Baby and find themselves inspired.
“The film is remarkably intimate and honest and truthful about [U2] at that time,” Guggenheim says. “I don’t think I know a movie in recent memory where rock stars have been so open, so that’s exciting. … It feels like one fantastic chapter in an epic story.”
Davis Guggenheim on filming an intimate, honest U2 | Ampersand | National Post
 
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