‘Stop Making Sense’: Paul Thomas Anderson discusses the concert movie that inspired ‘Junun’
When Paul Thomas Anderson was making the documentary Junun in Rajasthan, India, filming the creation of the album of the same name concocted by Israeli composer Shye Ben Tzur, Radiohead maestro Jonny Greenwood, producer Nigel Godrich and the Indian ensemble the Rajasthan Express, he had one inspiration in mind. In fact, most modern live music films only have one inspiration in mind and one stand-out masterpiece to beat.
Music has always been a central part of Anderson’s work. It practically played the lead in Licorice Pizza. Naturally, Junjun was different, though. The music was now very much in the foreground. He soon learnt that this process was a definitive part of filmmaking. So, he pored over “the best ever concert film” to serve as his sage. In fact, he even calls Junun his “Jonathan Demme film”.
However, he would happily admit that it didn’t eclipse what the director managed with Stop Making Sense back in 1984. Perhaps nothing ever will. In Anderson’s view, Demme had hit upon a filmmaking truth that “pure cinema was when a filmmaker films a musician”. In conversations that the pair have had, Demme has seemingly conveyed that his thoughts on the highest purpose of the art form is to capture music in motion.
With Junun, Anderson says, “I realised he was right”. After decades of making movies, he was startled by the purity of his experience of simply filming musicians making magic in India and the new outlook he could bring to that. “When you’re in the room and you just walk in and you’re taking away any dramatic structure, I just felt like this rush,” he said at an Austin Film Society discussion.
“There was performance. You’re filming people’s faces, and that’s what Jonathan would do,” he continued. As it happens, he did a lot of what Jonathan Demme would do throughout the process. “When you see a lot of these music films that he makes, he spends more time just looking at some closeup of somebody playing than anybody normally would. Normally, you see so much of the stage or something like that, but he’ll do this giant closeup of someone, not even the guitar, just a closeup of their face, and it’s takes your breath away.”
However, the beauty of Stop Making Sense extends beyond the naturalistic way in which he simply captures the magic of live music or the alternative perspective he can bring to it via the camera and its intimacy, but to some rarified realm where words struggle to reach, and no other concert film has even come close to whiffing.
Prior to Stop Making Sense, the platitudinal pinnacle of a concert film was how well ‘it made you feel like you were there’. In reality, this is, of course, an impossible feat, and there are hours of pointless shots of sweaty crowds that stand as evidence of this folly. Nothing about the epochal Talking Heads’ effort aches to fulfil this futile goal. It is very happy to accept a divide between the band, the audience present at Los Angeles’ Pantages Theater in 1983, and those watching on from the comfort of a cosy, popcorn kernel-incrusted cinema seat.
The beauty of the film, however, is that by the end, this divide has, indeed, been eviscerated. You watch on, immersed in the magic of live music. It barely matters that you weren’t there because the filmmaking itself makes up for any shortfall in ‘live’ vitality. Soon, as you sip your red wine on a Friday night at home, you feel as though you have the best seat in the house anyhow. There is a rare swell of euphoria as the gathering grooves embalm you in rhapsody.
This energy only arises when there is steadfast confidence in a visionary idea. At no point do you feel like the band or Demme hummed and hawed over whether the opening of Byrne alone in a solo capacity was too low-key, whether the enlarged suit might be distracting, or even whether the steady introduction of new elements might become fraught and jarring. It feels simply like pure, unbridled creative flow, executed with sincerity and passion. That is an infectious force to behold—so infectious, in fact, that all the subtle messages behind the orchestration, the Japanese theatre inspirations, and commentary on culture are subsumed within a simple blunderbuss of captivating fun.
If music is the best thing that humans are capable of, then perhaps Demme is right: capturing that in a way that redoubles the life-affirming message of the art is perhaps the highest purpose of filmmaking.
