You might end up in a movie show with “Stop Making Sense” taking part in and the members of Talking Heads within the viewers.
That was the once-in-a-lifetime state of affairs when the brand new 4K restoration of “Stop Making Sense” premiered not too long ago on the Toronto International Film Festival. On display screen was a younger, elastic David Byrne. In the theater, he was dancing, too, together with a crowd who couldn’t keep seated for “Burning Down the House.”
“For a moment I thought, ‘Is it OK for me to get up and dance at our own movie?” Byrne says, laughing, the morning after. “But how could you not?”
For practically 4 many years, “Stop Making Sense,” directed by Jonathan Demme, has exerted an inexorable pull on all who encounter the frenetic fever of arguably the best live performance movie ever made. Its energy to convey collectively — it opens with Byrne alone on a spare stage and swells into an art-funk spectacular — is such that it’s even managed to reunite the Talking Heads, too.
For the primary time in 21 years, the Talking Heads are a band once more, even when solely in film theaters. Byrne, the band’s principal songwriter and singer, keyboardist-guitarist Jerry Harrison, bassist Tina Weymouth and drummer Chris Frantz — who final gathered collectively in 2002 for his or her induction to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame — have assembled as soon as extra for the rerelease of “Stop Making Sense.”
“It feels normal,” says Weymouth. “I mean, this is our tour. We’re touring this movie.”
Since they formally broke up in 1991, the 4 members of Talking Heads have usually squabbled, bitterly. Byrne has mentioned he regrets his function within the band’s “ugly” dissolution. Frantz, who’s married to Weymouth, revealed a 2020 memoir that described a few of the discord and lingering hurts. When Byrne mounted the acclaimed Broadway present “American Utopia” just a few years in the past, that includes many Talking Heads songs, Frantz was stung to not even be invited.
As the group congregated the morning after the “Stop Making Sense” premiere for an interview, although, they had been cordial with one another. They’re now all of their early ’70s. “How you livin’, Jerry?” greeted Frantz. Byrne gazed out the window, considering a potential biking route for the afternoon. He and Harrison sat on one sofa, Weymouth and Frantz on one other.
Their spirits had been excessive. The movie stays in gentle, a potent reminder of Talking Heads’ uniquely transfixing energy. Harrison helped oversee the restoration from the long-lost authentic negatives. It opens on IMAX screens Friday and in different theaters Sept. 29.
“One of the things that happened to me in rewatching it and working on it, was realizing: ‘Oh my God is everybody good,’” says Harrison.
“I didn’t know I was cute,” smiled Weymouth, who nimbly bounces from one foot to the opposite all through the movie. “The whole band, they were so attractive, so beautiful.”
“Stop Making Sense,” filmed over 4 nights at Los Angeles’ Pantages Theater in 1983, hasn’t dimmed with time. “Same as it ever was,” you may say. What begins with a solitary Byrne, with an acoustic guitar and boombox, steadily accumulates because the members of the band be a part of him, then others like Parliament-Funkadelic keyboardist Bernie Worrell and guitarist Alex Weir. This jittery, wide-eyed musician singing of psycho killers to a syncopated beat attracts a legion. His actions are malleable and fixed. The music grows euphoric. This IS a celebration. This IS a disco.
“It’s the unbridled joyousness of the performance, which snowballs,” says Frantz. “It starts off with ‘Psycho Killer,’ which is a thing unto itself. But it snowballs into this ecstatic experience. You can see it very clearly with the band members. They’re gettin’ more and more fever.”
“They’re going to church,” provides Weymouth.
Demme , who died in 2017, as soon as referred to as taking pictures dwell music “the purest form of filmmaking.” And a lot of “Stop Making Sense,” with an eagerly responsive Demme and cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth catching all of the interactions between the band, approaches an ideal concord of sound and picture.
Now THAT, Byrne mentioned after watching the movie on IMAX, is why you go to the films.
Byrne had choregraphed the Talking Heads tour that yr, for the album “Speaking in Tongues.” Their live performance got here ready-made for Demme, a loyal Heads fan and an ardent music listener who approached the band with producer Gary Goetzman after seeing them carry out in 1983 on the Hollywood Bowl.
“The great thing about Jonathan Demme was he had this amazing enthusiasm,” says Weymouth.
For a number of weeks beforehand, visible guide Sandy McLeod got here alongside on tour to plot out how the filmmakers may doc the live performance. Byrne’s idea stemmed from, he says, “showing people what it takes to put on a show.”
“We start with an empty stage and gradually add each part, each musician. As they come in, you hear what their contribution is,” Byrne says. “You see how it all gets done. It’s like a magician showing how the tricks are done, but the trick still works. We’ve seen behind the curtain, but the trick still works.”
And the “tricks” are grand. There’s, after all, Byrne’s iconic, Kabuki-influenced massive swimsuit in “Girlfriend Is Better”– now even larger in IMAX. (The massive swimsuit, itself, resides in an enormous field in Byrne’s workplace.) There’s additionally his achingly light dance with a ground lamp in “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)” — a luxurious echo to Gene Kelly’s faucet dance round a lamp publish in “Singin’ in the Rain.”
The lamps had been made specifically to be a little bit taller than the standard dimension, so they’d illuminate faces.
“We bought a few of them. They’d break all the time. I’d drop them and all the light bulbs would break,” says Byrne, laughing. “We’re kind of lucky that the ones in the film held up.”
Other components of “Stop Making Sense” have additionally proved remarkably resilient, although they are often more durable to pin down. The songs, significantly one thing like “Life During Wartime,” synthesized a contemporary discombobulation that was solely simply rising within the tech-nascent ’80s. “Stop Making Sense” — shot on movie with six cameras however combined digitally in Hal Ashby’s modifying room — heralded a disorienting data age future whereas on the identical time making the case that this unusual new world is also funky as hell.
“There’s most definitely a prescient nature in David’s lyrics,” Harrison says. “David seemed to capture, you might say, the future zeitgeist.”
That may be heard in what Byrne was singing about but it surely’s additionally embodied in his fixed, live-wire physicality. It was just a few years earlier than “Stop Making Sense,” on tour in 1980, that Byrne started to seek out his a stage persona.
“Before that, I didn’t move much. I just thought: It’s OK to move but you have to find your own way to do it. You can’t be imitating other performers,” he says. “So I just listened to the songs and thought: How does this groove make you move? On ‘Life During Wartime,’ I felt like running.”
Unlike most live performance movies, Demme elected to not lower away to the viewers till the ultimate moments of the movie. He wished to protect the pure expertise of a dwell live performance, and never combine in interviews alongside the way in which.
“U2 wanted to make a film that was better than ‘Stop Making Sense’ and then they went and ruined it by doing all those interviews,” Weymouth says. “The art should be separate from the personalities. So you don’t get all the dysfunction.”
To her, “Stop Making Sense” derives from a distinct period when not all the things was self-documented. It was a vividly clever presentation that left it as much as the viewer to interpret, or dance to.
Talking Heads by no means participated in one other movie, although Byrne’s “American Utopia” was captured thrillingly by Spike Lee in a 2020 movie. (Lee, in attendance on the Toronto premiere, pronounced “Stop Making Sense” “the GOAT” of live performance movies.)
The 1983 tour was the final time Talking Heads hit the highway, and Byrne has persistently mentioned he has no real interest in a reunion tour. After their expertise with Demme, a career-spanning documentary additionally appears unlikely.
“It would have to take something pretty extraordinary to make us want us to do something like that,” says Harrison. “If the right filmmaker came along and you could then imagine yourself in the framework he or she sets up, it’s possible. It certainly wouldn’t be now.”
Besides, who wants legacy burnishing when “Stop Making Sense” continues to be so alive? In dialog, the band time and again marveled at how deeply in tune they had been with each other then — maybe particularly in distinction to the years that adopted.
“This is going to sound really ridiculous but I think about the fusion of the sun,” says Weymouth. “It implodes and explodes. And I think that push and pull was so magical to our creative forces, the way that we worked together, the way we were supportive of each other. It was very special and none of us has found it again. If we sat down and played music, we’d be connecting again.”
The Talking Heads members are actually, a little bit surreally, a part of the viewers gazing again at “Stop Making Sense.” It stays the defining encapsulation of what the Talking Heads had been and what they achieved. If there’s one factor they’ll all agree on, it is an abiding love for it.
“Having had two near-death experiences in the past couple of years – one with Tina in a head-on car crash — who’s the guy who said ‘Enjoy every sandwich’? Warren Zevon,” Frantz says. “That’s what I’m doing.”
“It’s a good legacy. Now I can die,” says Weymouth, earlier than including: “I don’t want to.”
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