Why hasn’t David Byrne made a movie since ‘True Stories’?
After completing work on his feature-length directorial debut, True Stories, in 1986, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne reflected on the famous Orson Welles quote about how a movie set is like “the biggest toy a boy ever had”.
“That’s exactly what it felt like,” Byrne told the St Louis Post-Dispatch. “It was like a giant model train set. You could make the train go when you want and put the house where you want. But this film was made fairly inexpensively, so instead of putting the house where I wanted, I’d go and find one.”
Those aforementioned budget constraints, combined with an offbeat script and characters plucked from the realms of Robert Altman, Federico Fellini, and Jacques Tati, made True Stories a fairly tough sell to a mainstream audience. Even among critics, there was probably a bit of an unfair assumption, based on Byrne’s eccentric reputation and penchant for wearing oversized suits, that any film he made would be a dense and pretentious arthouse flick.
In reality, though, the great surprise of True Stories, for those who gave it a chance, was its soft and empathetic touch, and even with the satirical elements, the movie succeeded as a consistently funny, warm, and downright wholesome examination of small-town Americana. That didn’t help it succeed at the box office, of course, but Byrne’s little indie film has aged very well as a cult classic, first on VHS, then on DVD, and finally on to the full Criterion Collection Blu-ray treatment in 2018.
Within and beyond the fandom of the Talking Heads, viewers have come to appreciate Byrne’s impressive instincts as a first-time filmmaker. Considering that True Stories was also ostensibly a Talking Heads movie and a high-concept musical, complete with a dozen or more original songs, logic would seem to dictate that Byrne would earn the right to be a bit less ambitious in his future films, free of the tie-ins to his now defunct rock and roll band; instead, 40 years later, we’re still waiting for the next David Byrne film.
Back in 1986, when he was 34 years old and awaiting the box office returns on True Stories, Byrne seemed eager and hopeful about exploring more of these opportunities, but also quite aware that it would require sacrificing other parts of his career. “I guess I have to be very careful not to get carried away,” he told the Daily News, “I do want to direct another film, and [True Stories doing well] would help me get the chance, I suppose. If I want to do movies, though, I’ll have to do less music.”
Fortunately or unfortunately, True Stories flopped commercially, and Byrne’s conundrum was basically settled for him. Hollywood studios were not banging on his door for another project. As the years passed and Byrne moved on from the Talking Heads, the improving reputation of True Stories made it increasingly hard to fathom why a second chance at filmmaking continued to elude him. There were some concert films he worked on, and the odd documentary or two, but no further explorations of Byrne’s pure, creative cinematic mind.
In a more recent interview with the-talks.com, the frontman was quite frank about what had happened. “Somehow it was my fault,” he said, “After [True Stories] I was seduced by it and tried to get other movies going in Los Angeles, and it was a disaster. You hear the story over and over again of people who spend years trying to get something done, and if it takes too long, so I thought, ‘No, I don’t have the patience. I’ll write some songs and make a record… If you focus on making a movie, everything else is gone.”
Byrne is experiencing his sixth or seventh renaissance at the moment, starting with the massive success of his stage show and Spike Lee-directed concert film American Utopia, followed by the well-received 2025 album Who Is the Sky? Might he finally be ready to take another crack at a feature film at age 73, or if that medium become less useful to his purposes by this point, we’ll have to wait and see, but in the meantime, do check out True Stories if you haven’t seen it. If for no other reason, seeing a small Texas town depicted with no visible Trump signs is oddly calming.
