The Picture Show

The news that Terry Gilliam is due to direct the live feed of Arcade Fire’s Madison Square Garden show next week on Youtube is exciting – it’s tantalising to imagine just how the fantastical Gilliam will approach dealing with the raw, raucous euphoria of an Arcade Fire gig. Hollywood directors abandoning their big-budgeted, stringently-planned posts to dip their toes in the relatively anarchic world of music is nothing new, though. Quite aside from the amount of directors who’ve used music videos as a stepping stone to feature films – David Fincher, Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze amongst them – there’s enough who return to filming music videos or shows to suggest there’s alluring thrill to it that can’t be replicated on a set lot.

Jonathan Demme’s Talking Heads film, Stop Making Sense, pretty much sets the standard for a concert film, capturing David Byrne’s & co.’s arty, jittery quirks so perfectly that it’s regarded as the greatest rock film ever made. Previously, Demme was making films with Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn – hardly, you feel, the perfect stomping ground to prepare for a band leading the new wave vanguard. Stop Making Sense, though, encapsulates what a film director can bring to filming a gig that, perhaps, a regular MTV bod can’t, adding a suspense and energy to the editing that goes far and beyond your BBC Glasto footage. Furthermore, just as a director knows when to let his actors lead the way, Demme’s not afraid to stick the camera on Byrne and let him do his thing either.

At the other end of the art house scale is Cameron Crowe. A music journo for Rolling Stone before he became a director, Crowe went on to make the best film about 90s alt.rock in Singles and 70s decadent-rock in Almost Famous – there are, admittedly some duds in between and after – and his career came full circle last year when he helmed the slightly controversial promo for Pearl Jam’s comeback single ‘The Fixer’. It may be controversial amongst Pearl Jam loyalists The Ten Club because the clip contained extras, not real fans, and because the arch-stick-it-to-da-man-band had the footage used in a commercial by Target, a mass retail company, but what footage! Right up in grizzly ol’ Eddie Vedder’s face, ‘The Fixer’ video captures Pearl Jam’s ongoing vitality in clean, visceral blasts. And those extras look like they’re having fun, so who cares? Tim Burton, another Pearl Jam associate (they wrote ‘Man Of The Hour’ for the ending credits of Big Fish), might not have done any live concert filming – unless it’s a Cure concert on the moon, gigs are probably too steeped in the real world for Timbo’s liking – but he did shoot a suitably goth-comic vid for The Killers’ ‘Bones’ single.

The director whose most veered into the world of music is probably the best of them all – Martin Scorsese has balanced the likes of Goodfellas, The Departed and Taxi Driver with a couple of beautifully shot concerts and a few documentaries. His Bob Dylan documentary, No Direction Home, is certainly worth checking out but it’s The Last Waltz, which documents The Band’s last ever gig, and Shine A Light, in which, without CGI, he manages to make The Rolling Stones not look like decrepit, decades-past-it Grandads that are truly stunning. On top of that, he also directed Michael Jackson’s ‘Bad’ video. RESULT!

There’s a host of directors I’d love to see pitch up at a gig and do their pointy-camera-and-film thing: who better than Quentin Tarantino to capture the full riotous blood’n'guts of a Crystal Castles show, just how good would it see Christopher Nolan apply his calm-centre-of-the-storm approach to a film about, say, Glasto, or Shane Meadows to capture Mike Skinner’s urban scuzz? And maybe Robert Zemeckis, so adept at conveying pseudo saloon-bar banjo-slingers in Back To The Future Part 3, could do a Mumford & Sons one?