U2 Interviews
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- © Hot Press Vol. 25 No.4 12.03.2000
If it's Paris it must be Spring. Bono's been out
roaming the city of light with Miles' 1957 opus L'Ascenseur Pour
L'Echafaud on the headphones, feeling like . . . well, a million
dollars suggests itself as an appropriate image, but although the
singer's approaching 40 this May, he's not that green and crinkly
just yet.
Still, since the PopMart tour ground to a halt roughly this
time two years ago, Bono's experienced some pretty out-there
stuff, even by his standards. For a start, he fathered a third
child, Elijah, lost a laptop containing lyrics for the new U2
album (a replay of when his notebooks were stolen before the
October sessions), had a telephoto lens poked up his arse
courtesy of the Irish tabloids and received the MTV Free Your
Mind award last November.
He also refereed Hume and Trimble live on stage in the run up
to the Good Friday Agreement, lobbied the Clinton and Blair
administrations on behalf of Jubilee 2000, debated Radiohead
albums with hardline Republican House Budget Committee chairman
John Kasich, blagged meetings with the secretary to the American
treasury, the chairmen of Amex, American Express and the Federal
reserve . . . and lost his sunglasses to The Pope. The only major
player he hasn't crunched numbers with yet is God, but he's
probably working on it. By the time you read this, U2 will have
been granted the freedom of Dublin allowed to graze their
sheep on College Green forevermore.
And now there's the film, The Million Dollar Hotel, adapted by
Nicholas Klein from an original story by Bono (who also
co-produced) and directed by Wim Wenders. It says a lot about
Hollywood that the singer can get at least $100 billion worth of
Third World debt written off in 18 months, but it took him 12
years to get this movie made (at one point in the early '90s, it
looked like Winona Ryder and Gary Oldman might take the lead
roles, but financing fell through).
You've probably heard a rough synopsis of the film by now. The
singer has called the story "a dark fable about the redemptive
power of love", but there are also elements of murder mystery,
art-farce and even hints of science fiction. The action (or, this
being a Wenders film, absence of it) takes place in The Million
Dollar Hotel, a rundown establishment in downtown Los Angeles
which Bono first set eyes on at a photo shoot in 1987.
The yarn follows FBI agent Skinner (Mel Gibson) and his
attempts to investigate the possible murder of the hotel's rich
kid benefactor Izzy. He sets about interrogating the clientele of
misfits and misfortunates: the simple, smitten Tom Tom (Jeremy
Davies); the damaged damned-sel Eloise (Milla Jovovich); native
American artist Geronimo (Jimmy Smits); John Lennon obsessive
Dixie, who claims to have written all the Beatles' tunes (Peter
Stormare); Vivien (a reliably oddball Amanda Plummer) and Shorty
(Bud Cort, star of cult classic Harold & Maude). These
denizens all participate in a hoax which mythologises the
deceased Izzy as a "painter saint", attracting the bright lights
of the media to the hotel. And throughout all this, Skinner
exploits Tom Tom's love for Eloise as a means of finding Izzy's
killer.
The Million Dollar Hotel won the Silver Eagle prize at the
50th Berlin Film Festival a few weeks ago, but like all Wenders'
films of the last decade (excepting maybe Beyond The Clouds, the
director's collaboration with Michaelangelo Antonioni), it has
received a mixed response. Certainly, blockbuster fans lured by
the U2 connection and Mel Gibson might well be bewildered by what
is ostensibly an arthouse movie. Bono is frank and philosophical
about this, but maintains that even hostile critics have asked to
see it a second time, still haunted by Wenders' tone poem.
And when Bono describes his film maker friend as a "jazzman",
an old hand at to use the director's own phrase
"flying blind without instruments", he pinpoints what makes the
German such a bewitching and bewildering artist.
The impact of his work is residual, not immediate. Even with his
most confused work, the themes continue to resound in your inner
ear after the film has ended, just as the characters take up
residence in your head.
So, after all the hoo-ha generated by Bono's involvement has
subsided, The Million Dollar Hotel should eventually find its own
spirit level, perhaps somewhere between Jarmusch at his quirkiest
and Lynch at his most benign. For his part, upon being
congratulated on finally getting his creation onto the screen, Mr
Vox quips, "Bono voyage!" then chews over the suggestion that the
new movie constitutes a kind of lens through which to view U2's
travelling asylum. After all, as long ago as December 1988,
musing on the itinerant life in a Hot Press interview with Liam
Mackey, he admitted that, "the demons follow you home to the
padded cell of the hotel room." Familiar imagery, no?
"Yeah, there was always a fire escape, though," he chuckles.
"And I've taken full advantage of that. I think it is sad but
true that I know a lot about hotels. And having spent most of my
life in them, now, the final chapter in the Spinal Tap episode is
owning one: the guy comes back from touring and actually builds
his own Holiday Inn room! But my experience in hotels has for the
large part been the plate glass window to separate you from the
storms outside, whereas the experience of the people in the
Million Dollar Hotel is rather the opposite. It's a real
community. Milla Jovovich and Jeremy Davies became very friendly
with a lot of the people still living in the hotel as it was
still operational when we were shooting there on the weekends
in fact we'd have to drag her out of it.
And it's important not to caricature their lives.
"All cinema, all theatre is to a degree voyeurism," he
continues. "You get to stare at people up close. But we tried to
do it with some respect, and of course a lot of the lives in the
hotel are not such archetypes as the ones that we cast for the
movie there's a lot of decent people just getting on about
their day and people who arrived in LA looking for some
reasonably priced accommodation."
These hotel chronicles also incorporate allusions to other
films such as Milos Forman's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and
Tod Browning's Freaks (Skinner himself is a genetic mishap,
forced to wear a back brace as a result of a botched attempt to
remove a third arm "One of us!"). Shades of U2's origins in
the Lypton Village construct here, the artistic collective as a
dysfunctional family, misfits getting by in the straight world by
commodifying their deviancy.
"That's interesting," Bono concedes. "Well, in the movie, I
suppose everybody has a front of one sort or another, but with
the scam they have a chance for the first time to come together
and they develop a united front which brings them all out of each
other. They all have to co-operate with a lie in order to
discover their potential. And I suppose if you wanted to stretch
the metaphor to The Village and Ballymun/Finglas 1976/77, that's
certainly the way it worked for us then.
"But we, I suppose, in a very suburban way, were still
dressing up," he continues. "It was a sort of Hallowe'en madness,
and even though behind where Gavin lived there was, as it was
known, 'The Mentaller', I think the urban experience of people
who have fallen out of the sort of health insurance/social
services loop is a very different experience, and I would not try
to compare ours [to it]. It's a shock, but in the late 80s in
America you could still starve. I mean, Reagan closed down a lot
of these mental hospitals and hence some of the clientele at the
Million Dollar Hotel were in fact outpatients from mental
hospitals. That was the point that I discovered them in
1988."
Several people have pointed out the similarities between Tom
Tom and a young Gavin Friday, Dave-Id, Bono's own appetite for
mischief . . .
"I can't really comment. You know, we all kinda resemble each
other with a few drinks; Gavin, Dave-Id, myself, there's a few
people, if you put them into the blender, you might get to Tom
Tom. But the key is the rhythm."
And also the tone. The Million Dollar Hotel is hardly
existential slapstick, but it does contain more wry,
side-of-the-mouth moments than your average Wenders film.
"It's true, it has a touch of comedy," the director himself
testifies the next day, speaking from Munich. "Jon Hassell, the
trumpet player on the soundtrack, when he saw it he found the
right category for it, he called it a 'screwball tragedy'."
Hassell also provides what Bono recently described as "the
blue mood verging on purple", working alongside Greg Cohen, Bill
Frisell, Brian Blade, Adam Dorn, Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois,
under the auspices of maestro Hal Willner (himself no slouch at
constructing elaborate dreamscapes). The result is an album where
the songs proper are as rich in atmosphere as crafty
Badalamenti-esque interludes like 'Funny Face' and
'Bathtub'.
"I think it's the first time in a while where
songs are used as score, where the scenes were actually cut with
the songs in mind, as opposed to songs just coming in to provide
music," Bono suggests, perhaps providing ammunition for those
who've compared the film to a music video. "Recording the
soundtrack was a piece of piss. We did it in ten days. It was
effortless, we just put up the pictures, we got three giant
monitors in the studio, and everyone just kind of responded to
the picture. It was a thrill. And Jon Hassell is really the sort
of keeper of the flame at the moment, there's no-one who plays
trumpet like him. He doesn't like the words 'jazz' or 'new age',
in fact, that's the reason why no-one can find his listing in the
record shop he just keeps refusing to come in under any
heading. I don't blame him. But he's certainly a man who lives up
to his name!"
Let's play paradoxes awhile. Bono's uneasi-ness with the very
myths and legends on which rock 'n' roll was founded is central
to what makes U2 a great rock 'n' roll band. The quartet's
querying of core rock 'n' roll fallacies such as the
burn-out/fade-away clause their essential contrariness
eventually qualified them for the iconic status they seemed
to covet so zealously around about Rattle & Hum time.
Bono's distrust of the Jesus Cobain complex seems to manifest
itself in The Million Dollar Hotel through a kind of implied
antipathy towards the character of Izzy to all intents and
purposes a trust fund brat on the slum. Put this to the singer
though, and he somewhat surprisingly turns the argument around by
aligning himself with the death-tripper.
"Izzy, to my mind, represents our position," he says, "because
with him comes the cameras, the TV anchor people, the journalists
and the writers, which is exactly what we've done to that hotel
by my writing the movie."
Scratch that theory then. Let's try another angle. In the
film, the friction between Skinner and Dixie the Beatles freak is
quite timely, given not only recent disclosures about the FBI
Lennon file, but also the imminent release of Mark Chapman. Has
Bono ever suffered from crazies claiming to have written 'Pride'
or 'Sunday Bloody Sunday'?
"Yeah, I've had some very direct experience of stalking," he
admits. "I don't want to get into names or places because it can
be an ongoing problem, but let's say I and the office of U2 have
had experience of armed and dangerous stalkers at the time when
this piece was written.
"There was an amusing incident in a hotel in Los Angeles
around about that time, where the stalker had committed a date
for revenge on not receiving his royalties. And so they had a
load of FBI people around the place where I was staying, it was
one of these bungalows you get in the grounds of the hotel. So
anyway, midnight had passed and I wasn't dead at least as
far as I could make out and I went asleep and I guess it
was in the back of my mind. And I woke up to this 'Bang!',
y'know, a very loud crack, and I was up firing telephones and
lashing out in the dark with Cuban heels and anything I could
find in the direction of the bang. But it was just my suitcase
had fallen off the edge of the bed (laughs). Anyway, he went away
eventually and I think he bothered somebody else."
How did Bono feel about making a cameo appearance in Brett
Easton Ellis' American Psycho, fixated on by the deranged
Bateman?
"Somebody showed me that . . . what was his first book?"
Less Than Zero.
"I read that, I didn't actually get onto American Psycho. In
New York at the time, the bit I did read didn't feel like
fiction. Somebody showed me the passage (but) it was a long time
ago, so I can't really remember a response."
Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief in The
Million Dollar Hotel's art forgery sub-plot, Julian Sands' dealer
character Terence Scopey appraises Izzy's paintings as garbage,
"but important garbage". In this scene, he could almost be
reiterating U2's celebration of precious detritus on the Zoo TV
extravaganza. Remembering dramatis personae like The Mirrorball
Man and The Fly, it's perhaps no surprise that U2's frontman
identifies with the hypemeister.
"It's a great moment," he laughs. "Wim asked me to play a few
of the parts in the movie and the last one I turned down was the
part of Scopey the art dealer, and indeed Julian Sands was
wearing a pair of my glasses. I have to say, it's one of my
favourite scenes. There's a few scenes are worth going back to
see a few times, that's certainly one of them (adopts Scopey's
voice): "Large . . . dark . . . important .. . . erotic . . . I
can sell it!' He's a really exceptional actor actually, I'm very
glad he did it. The artist . . . as you know we got Julian
Schnabel to actually paint the paintings, and of course he would
stand by Scopey's scene. In so many ways the dealer has become
the artist."
While we're on the art tack, let's freeze frame the scene
where Eloise and Tom Tom, on the run from the police, lie side by
side in a room in the hotel with hands clamped over each other's
mouths, an image which could almost be a still from Achtung Baby.
One of the trains of thought Bono was fond of joyriding around
Zoo-time referenced their televisual-surrealist impressions of
The Gulf War to Picasso's 'Guernica', the painter's howl of
response to the bombardment of the small Spanish town in 1937.
Similarly, Dali's 'Autumn Cannibalism', which depicts the Spanish
civil war as lovers devouring each other with knives and forks,
just might constitute the visual link between The Gulf's global
theatre of hate (Zoo TV) and love's private kitchen stink
(Achtung Baby).
Bono: "Well, one of the lines of questioning that you're on is
sharp in that the movie, though it was started in the '80s, with
our kind of fan club relationship to America, has in its visuals
that appreciation of Americana and the sort of Hopper-like
pictures, and yet in its scenes, it's very much like where we
went in the '90s, and I think it does bridge those two very
well."
Another invisible middleman here might be Sam Shepard, whose
writings were a catalyst for Rattle & Hum's finest track
'Hawkmoon 269' and whose Motel Chronicles formed the basis for
Wenders' Paris Texas. In that '984 movie, the director, often
criticised for idealising women, painted Nastassja Kinski with
just the right amount of innocence and experience. Eloise could
almost be her character's kid sister, and one of the film's more
fruitful contradictions stems from the rub between Wenders'
tendency to worship and Bono's more torch-noir approach, evident
in songs like 'With Or Without You' and 'Luminous Times (Hold On
To Love)'.
"My reasons for that are mostly, as a songwriter, practical,
in that I don't wanna write a song that reddens my face when I
hear it on the radio," he reckons. "And I have written some
straight love songs only to have put them aside because they
might elicit projectile vomiting from the great outdoors! So I
like love songs that are bittersweet, and I like women to be more
complex in songs because that's my experience of them in life.
But I think everyone gets it in the neck, don't they? Not just
women. I would think if anything I'm harder on the singer than
the subject."
True enough, the men often adopt subservient positions in U2
songs. They can even be quite feminine.
"Yeah, I think that's probably true. Well, when you're as
macho as I am you can afford that kind of posture!"
Nevertheless, without getting into S&M territory, there is
the recurring idea of mutual smothering, of love as a sexually
transmitted disease.
"Yeah, I think there's a lot of cannibalism in the U2 love
songs," he admits, "but I think that comes out of the sort of
hunger people can have for each other, and I think what's
interesting about Tom Tom is that his is not a sexual hunger.
He's the only one really in the hotel who's capable of
unconditional love, and that is the only kind of love that can
wake her up. And characters who've suffered a lot of abuse, like
the character Eloise is based on, sex is just . . . they're kinda
numb often times, sexually.
"Again, it's that curse of a beautiful face," Bono elaborates,
"because it brings out the ugliness in a lot of other people; in
women in their resentment, in men in their desire to own or to
unmask. And I think that having met, y'know, some of the most
beautiful women in my travels, I'm often struck by how common
courtesy and more old fashioned characteristics like Tom Tom has
mean so much, it's kind of a shock. But you realise they've had
the hard stares all their life. And Eloise is like that, in fact,
her dominant characteristic is 'offer no resistance, suffer no
pain'. She's like, 'If they want it, they can have it'. He's the
first character who doesn't really want it, he actually wants
her, and it's a real love story. And I think that's probably the
saddest metaphor of all, that it takes a slightly retarded guy to
be able to love with the kind of purity that she needs to purify
her."
Sad is right. And yet, there's something unnerving about
another tender scene in The Million Dollar Hotel, where Eloise
teases Tom Tom into playing up his retardation, reasoning that if
she's going to play whore for him, he can play simpleton for her.
Here, the film flaunts notions of correctness just as The Prunes
did in their prime. On one hand, it confronts taboo subjects such
as the sexuality of the infantile or infirm, on the other, it
lays itself open to charges of fetishising Tom Tom's "slowness".
It's a riddle which requires more time with Bono than this
writer's got, yet refuses to resolve itself in the days after the
interview. Again, the residue.
The Million Dollar Hotel begins and ends with a leap. Tom Tom
launches himself off the roof of the hotel, and we hear these
lines: "After I jumped, I discovered; life is perfect . . . life
is the best." It's an outstanding scene and you can read it a few
ways: as a reprise of the angels Cassiel and Damiel's fall to
earth in Wings Of Desire and faraway So Close!; as the
life-and-death leap Bono took from the Live Aid stage in 1985,
the precise moment where U2 were transformed from successful rock
band to global phenomenon; or the leap of faith taken by the
free-blowing jazzer, trusting that the next note will be there.
And of course, there's the step taken by newlyweds, from the
altar into the abyss . . .
"Y'know, I just think people loving each other is a kind of
miracle," Bono reflects. "And I think it's against all odds and I
think everything in the world conspires against that, from just
the humdrum of paying the bills to desire 'cos sex has been
elevated to the ultimate commodity, the one that you can't live
without and I'm just amazed when I meet people like that.
And this doesn't come from any disappointment myself, I just
think it's a remarkable thing to see, and I don't think we should
accept it as normal.
"It's like when you see people getting married because it's
that time and you just kind of think, 'Oh no!' Marriage is this
grand madness, and I think if people knew that, they would
perhaps take it more seriously. The reason why there's operas and
novels and pop tunes written about love is because it's such an
extraordinary thing, not because it's commonplace, and yet that's
what you're told, you grow up with this idea that it's the
norm."
'The Ground Beneath Her Feet' is at once an opera, a novel and
a pop tune. The lyrics might come courtesy of Salman Rushdie's
novel, but as the editor of this organ recently indicated, drop
the 'The' from the song title and you get a typically ambivalent
U2 title. But as well as stretching Bono's interpretive skills,
the flagship song from the soundtrack also introduces a new shade
to U2's sonic palate in the form of Daniel Lanois' cosmic pedal
steel.
"I've got this kind of sci-fi country and western thing
going," Bono laughs. "And when I say sci-fi I'm talking the Milky
Way rather than the moon over the brow of the hill. I can't quite
get everyone else onto this trip! I'm trying to talk Dan into
doing an album of pedal steel, because his pedal steel has none
of the sentimentality normally associated with the instrument,
and he's added a couple of extra frets in order to get to these
icy top notes."
But are there any other real clues in the The Million Dollar
Hotel soundtrack as to where U2 are heading next? Hard to say
just yet. Bono's "nixers" have put an undoubted strain on the
group (and its handlers!), but U2 sidebar projects often gain
currency with the benefit of hindsight. Edge's collaborations
with Holger Czukay and Jah Wobble not to mention the
Captive soundtrack ran in tandem with the delicately woven
soundscapes of The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree, the
steel pulses of the Clockwork Orange stage project predicted the
polyrhythmic turmoil of 'The Fly' and even 'Mofo', and
Passengers' intricate logarithms plotted a course for Pop
music.
Given that Bono's been bandying words like "fire", "spunk" and
"ecstatic" around, one suspects that the new record will be
another bold statement. Perversely though, this time out U2 might
eschew the importance of being earnest and ironic in favour of
Not Being There at all. If Bono's remarks to Sean O'Hagan in The
Guardian are anything to go by, he's getting ready to not just
discard the masks, but to take his face off:
"It's all written from a certain point of view,
and if there is a governing idea it comes from something the
Irish poet Brendan Kennelly once said that the best way to
write was to imagine you're dead. You lose all vanity then . .
..
I suppose what I'm saying is that you should treat every album
as if it's your last, as if your life depended on it."
To this writer, Bono simply says, "It's getting very exciting
down there at the moment they're real songs." And if he
seems wary of giving too much away, perhaps it's because in the
past he has prematurely prophesied speed-skiffle Ukranian folk
albums (or sci-fi country for that matter!) and lived to regret
it.
In conclusion, I ask the singer if he has any questions for
Wim Wenders, whom your reporter is scheduled to interview the
next day.
"You should ask him why he made me do a cameo," he decides,
after a long pause. "Because I objected to it at the time and I
object to it even more now because I think it breaks the spell,
it looks like Rock Star Appears In His Own Movie. If you could
ask him that, I'd like a good reason why he wanted me in it. To
me, it's a kind of a fable, and you don't want to wake up out of
the spell of it, and when you see me, you go, 'Oh there's yer
man! That's right, he did the music!'"
The Million Dollar Hotel soundtrack is out now on
Island/Universal. The film is released on April 28th. There will
be a full length interview with Wim Wenders in the next issue of
Hot Press.
Auteur Auteur - Wim Wenders Checks In
PM: First, a question from Bono: Why did you put him in the
film?!! He still seems very uncomfortable with it.
Wim Wenders: Ah, yeah (sighs). See, that's a tough one. I
really wanted to convince him to play a longer part, I really
wanted him to be Joe the concierge, and I think that would've
been less self-conscious than his short appearance now. So maybe
the short appearance now is a strange leftover from a much bigger
desire that just didn't work out. I think Bono would've had the
guts to do it, but when we shot in March last year the band had
just started to lay down the first tracks for the new album and I
think they really didn't want to let Bono go at that time. Joe
was a part that would have to be present during the whole shoot,
so we had to renounce on Bono.
And then as he was present on the set for a week in between, I
just shoved him into the scene, and he's joined by an old
combatant you see maybe that Anton Corbijn is taking a
picture of him as the camera passes.
The story for The Million Dollar Hotel had been kicking around
for a few years what drew you to it?
What drew me to it instantly, first reading I must say, was
the characters. Beautiful characters in it, incredible people
that I felt had no precedent in movies. And I read that first
script that Bono had given me not thinking I would be the
director but thinking Bono needed good advice from me. And I made
lots of notes still thinking only in terms of advice, and then
Bono and I talked for a couple of days. And the more advice I
gave the more I was hooked. And at the very end when the only
question left (was), "Well, who could I suggest as a director?",
he just looked at me and smiled and I knew that had been his
strategy.
Was Nicholas Klein involved at that stage?
Yeah, Nicholas had written that first draft, and then the
three of us started to go to work, and we worked for several
years on improving the script.
I barely recognised Peter Stormare as Dixie . . .
You must have seen him in Fargo and The Big Liebowski I
don't recognise him from one movie to another, and he really did
something incredible in slipping into John Lennon's skin here in
this film.
You've been criticised for idealising women in your films,
whereas Bono is harder on his heroines . . .
She (Eloise) comes out alright, actually. I think the one love
song in the film sung by Bono that really defines the movie is
'The Ground Beneath Your Feet'. I first listened to it when Bono
played a very rough version to me and I didn't really know
anything about it yet, and I thought he had so perfectly grasped
the spirit of the film I couldn't believe it. I fought hard to
get it in the film because I thought it was just too good to be
true for us. That song really defines the attitude of the film
towards Eloise.
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