THE BUSINESS OF ARTISTIC FREEDOM: An interview with I Am Trying To Break Your Heart director Sam Jones. By Warren Curry 7/27/02 Part 1 of 2

Award winning photographer Sam Jones's (whose work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire and GQ) decision to trade in his still camera for a movie camera turned out to be a rewarding one. His debut feature film, I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, was originally intended to simply document the popular alternative rock band Wilco's process of recording their fourth album "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot." What resulted was much more than the filmmaker anticipated, as Wilco endured a split with their label, AOL Time-Warner-owned Reprise Records, over artistic differences concerning the new LP and inner fighting amongst band members Jeff Tweedy and Jay Bennett, which led to Bennett's dismissal. In the ultimate ironic twist of fate, "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" was finally released in April of 2002 on Nonesuch records, another label owned by none other than AOL Time-Warner. The album turned out to be an overwhelming critical and commercial success.

We caught up with Sam Jones at the recent Los Angeles press day for his debut feature film. Cowboy Pictures released the film in New York on June 26, and it will open in Los Angeles on August 2.

Were you friends with Wilco prior to making the film?

No, I wasn't. I didn't know them at all, so I just wrote them a letter and told them what I wanted to do. And they were like, "Come to Chicago and tell us more."

Why Wilco?

To me, they're like the last middle class American band in a lot of ways. They're touring -- they're not just going out and being a jukebox for the record, they're playing vital live shows. They're really under the radar of a lot of people because they're not on the radio and not on MTV, but yet they're at the top of all the critics' lists. The way they record and the way they conduct themselves is not really according to demographics or marketing. They're kind of like The Band was or The Velvet Underground; they really know that this is their time and they're making their music the way they want to. People don't know that much about them. Even if they know their music, they don't know that much about them as people. To me, it was important to pick a band that didn't already have a visual reference to people.

Why did you decide to shoot in black and white?

I'm a photographer, so I've shot a lot of black and white and I just love it. I think it really clears out the frame. It really gets it down to the essential elements. In photography, it really gets it down to expression and the one shape that's conveying something. In film, I really think it lets you be in the story really clearly. Then there's the practical thing. I wanted to shoot it on film and I wanted to be able to go from room to room, from city to city, from state to state and have the film have a consistent look. Some of my favorite films are in black and white. One of my favorite films -- I know most people hate it -- is Woody Allen's Shadows and Fog. I probably liked it more for its look than anything else. There's this experience of seeing black and white on the big screen that takes you out of time and place, and I thought that this whole Wilco story could be really cool if you weren't constantly thinking, "What's that thing say on the wall behind them or look there's a red Diet Coke can with a yellow rim on it advertising Universal Studios." It takes you out of all that, and it doesn't make you think time and place so much. I just thought it would really fit Wilco. I don't want to make it sound like I chose black and white because Wilco is a really anachronistic type of musical experience, because it's not. I think they're making really forward thinking music, but they do have that integrity that older bands have. They have that quality of The Band or Dylan where they're on their own schedule doing things their own way.

How much footage did you have before editing?

I had 86 hours of footage all told. We have a DVD coming out at the end of the year with an extra disc that has 20 extra songs on it. I wanted to fit so many songs in the movie. I think there are 28 songs in the movie, part or whole, but I have all these performances -- rehearsals, back stage stuff and on stage. We cut a cool second disc together that's kind of like a record.

When you first conceived the project, Wilco hadn't yet had the fallout with their record label. How did you originally envision the film?

Not as differently as people would think, because I was planning on following the recording process up through the marketing and the record company picking a single -- for lack of a better term -- and following it through its release. I didn't see it as that different, it's just that the elements within that whole process I didn't imagine would be so dynamic. I imagined watching the process from writing a record all the way through to putting it out.

An interesting element the film examines is the strange bedfellows that art and commerce so often make.

And it's less like they co-exist or that they're related, but occasionally they just have to butt up against each other. David Fricke (of Rolling Stone magazine) kind of becomes the moral center of the movie, in terms of the way he relates. He uses different examples other than just bands. He uses examples of poetry and literature and technological inventions as being something that you can't just dissect and move on, which is the exact antithesis of pop culture. There is something that he says in the movie that I wanted to say very much, which is if you want to get something out of something you have to put something of yourself into it. You can't describe Wilco in one or two words. They're a very hard band to just play one song (of their's) to somebody and say, "This is what Wilco sounds like." You have to play them a whole record.

If anyone was still planning to classify Wilco with the convenient tag of "alt.country," they certainly blasted holes in that label with "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot."

But they still get saddled with it. There is this thing where people try so hard to define things in one or two word descriptions and that's like calling Picasso a cubist or a modernist or whatever. That's exactly what art isn't. That's a limiting thing and it's always kind of funny when that ends up happening, because that's everything Wilco doesn't want to be.

There's a scene in the film where you go backstage during one of Jeff's solo performances. A handful of people from Reprise Records are there to see him, and he definitely keeps them at arm's length. This leads me to believe he's kind of a private person, so when you approached Jeff about making the film, did you find him to be resistant at all?

I didn't, but I think the whole underlying subtext of that particular moment is that Jeff is very good at detecting bullshit, and I think those backstage things are really uncomfortable -- not just for him, but for anybody. I think there are people who can handle them better, but especially for Jeff -- the people that are in there are more concerned about how they're sounding and they want to say something cool. They're not really in the moment of, "Hey, I really want to talk to Jeff about something." It's more like, "Hey, I'm talking to Jeff." Jeff is a really sincere person and he's not someone who can just blow someone off, so when someone asks him what the record sounds like, he's not going to be like, "Oh, buy it in the stores -- you'll like it." He tries to describe it the way he hears it. "There are holes in the music and there's more space in the music." Of course, no one was expecting a real answer in that room. They were just all waiting for the bullshit small talk answer, which Jeff's not capable of, which makes him completely uncomfortable in those kinds of situations. What I try to do is show that when Jeff left the room and I stayed (in the room) that all the air left the room, because no one in there was really interested in the moment or the conversation. They were more interested about the event itself, which makes Jeff very uncomfortable. He's not an event; he's a person. Everyone in that room feels like they have to say something. It's hard a situation for them too. The thing I noticed about Jeff is that you can learn more about him by observing him than by asking questions. You learn a lot about his character in that scene, you learn a lot about his character in the bathroom and talking to his wife on the phone and how he deals with Jay Bennett. He's the kind of guy you can get to know by not cornering him but just observing and being around him. We hit it off right when me met. We had similar references in music and art, and we're close in age. I think he got that I was sincere about what I was doing, and I wasn't just a fan trying to hone in on Wilco. I think he respected that I was using the whole Wilco experience to make a film about some things I wanted to say about music and that I kind of had my job and he had his job. He didn't hold me at arm's length at all.

Click for Part Two

Home

Reviews

More Articles

IndieSpeak