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Interview at GreenCine with AJ Schnack

You can find the interview by Francine Taylor here.

An excerpt:

I think that one of the things about the film, the way I shot it, the sense of where he came from was so important. Just the idea of what Aberdeen was all about and what Olympia was all about - these two opposite sides, one masculine, one feminine - battling it out for his soul. I think that that is crucial to who he was. And the thing with Kurt is, you could look at him and wonder if it would have changed the ultimate end of his story.

His dealing with chronic pain?

Yeah and the fact that he gets so famous so quickly. It's so unrealistic what happened to him. He was living in this place, in Olympia - and I hope people get that he wasn't Seattle-bound, he was Olympia-bound - you know, he's living in this apartment in Olympia and in less than a year he's the most famous rock star in the world and he's in the tabloids.

A Conversation With Cinematographer Wyatt Troll

Speaking of cinematography - and since we're on the verge of the next Toronto Film Festival - let's take a look back to 2006 and a conversation that my DP Wyatt Troll and I had about the making of About A Son.  Here's the piece, which still lives over at the Toronto Fest's most excellent Doc Blog. 

A sampling:

AJ:  (W)e knew it was going to be this new way of working.  It wasn’t a traditional documentary shoot at all, in terms of interviews or verite shooting style.  It was more structured, but yet we also had, I think, a real freedom to discover as we were going.

Wyatt:  I have to say you may be right (which, by the way, is what WC Fields said to all his fan letters, good or bad) but really some of the most exciting things are things that happened because we were there and open, but the structure got us there and allowed us that leniency.

Was there something that happened that was unexpected (camera wise) that changed your perspective of lensing or even your process?

AJ:  I’m really glad that we had the chance to go up and shoot for a few days last September in a non-pressure environment.  [Note: This was a scout/test shoot with Wyatt and my producer Shirley Moyers.]  I really think that that experience gave me a good idea what was working and what could change.  For example, just trying out different film stocks on that trip made me realize that each city really needed its own look.  But even when we got into shooting, I felt that it only took until the 2nd or 3rd day for us - both you and I and the rest of the crew - to get a handle on how we were working.  From then on, I felt like we were operating in a really comfortable place. 

I have to say, that it was one of the happiest work experiences I ever had.  I was describing it recently to someone and they interupted me and said, “wow, you really love what you do.”  And while that’s true, I also feel that it was part of how everything worked from both from a production and also a shooting perspective.  Our crew really bought into this “structured guerilla” form of working.  The overall experience completely changed how I want to approach nonfiction filmmaking in the future.

Wyatt:  I was constructively nervous before we went up the first time as to what overall perspective to take.  As I read Michael (Azerrad)’s book I came to this realization that Kurt never solidified the lyrics to a song until 5 minutes before recording them.  FUCK! Thats amazing.  I thought, what if I took this total zen/anarchist will to create and just let it happen...so I approached the shoot in this manner.  In a way it’s so ballsy, but it seemed the way to approach it.  Really, you gave such an open view into this world to give us the opportunity to go out on this raw limb.  It truly was a rad open creative time, maybe we can do some re-shoots....

Interview with AJ Schnack (on Sujewa Ekanayake's Blog)

DIY film superstar Sujewa Ekanayake just posted a recent interview with director AJ Schnack here.  A sampling:

Sujewa: One thing that your movie demonstrated to me was that he was pretty much an ordinary guy. Very talented, but an ordinary guy. So was that something that you wanted to convey to people who had a misconception about Cobain?

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AJ: Oh yeah, sure. There was actually a guy last night [at the post-screening Q & A at SilverDocs] who took offense at that I thought of him [Kurt Cobain] as ordinary and I thought that was very weird, I didn't know where he was coming from, but that's the thing about Kurt that's so interesting, he's - I guess you could say this about a lot of artists, what I felt about Kurt was that he was turned into this God-like figure, this tragic God-like figure, that he's been stripped of all his humanity, and part of what's involved in humanity are flaws and defects and he clearly had those.  I wanted to do a portrait of someone who is not set up to be a God or perfect. And in a way maybe that is one thing that is different about the film than maybe a lot of rock bios because you are ultimately trying to lift up your subject matter...And this is more a film about the star you think you have an idea of who he is, but he is someone else. And this is what it is to be this man. And hopefully that comes across. And people do get a sense of him as being an ordinary guy. That's in fact why he continues to live on in so many people. That's because they identify with him as this underdog. This ordinary guy who is different from the jocks and different from other people, didn't know quite what to do with his artistic talents.

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Rolling Stone: "Behind the Movie That's Moving Audiences to Tears"

From a piece on Rolling Stone.com by Leslie Savage:

You’ll hear only one voice in About a Son — Cobain’s — and there’s no footage of Nirvana or even Kurt himself in the film. “It was more about bringing him into the realm of a three-dimensional human being, not the cartoon rock icon,” says Azerrad, who drew from a bank of more than twenty-five hours of previously unheard audio tape for the project, which was directed by AJ Schnack. “It’s not a look back at Kurt, it’s a look into Kurt.”

The visuals are comprised of award-winning cinematography shot on 35 mm film of the three Washington cities in which the rocker lived throughout his life: Aberdeen, Olympia and Seattle. One final image of Cobain shows up at the end of the film, but Azerrad declined to reveal it (“It’s like giving away the end of Harry Potter”). There’s no Nirvana music on the soundtrack, either. Instead, the film is set to an emotional original score by Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard and a collection of Cobain’s favorite artists including Queen, David Bowie, Mudhoney and Iggy Pop (the soundtrack will get a September 11 release on Barsuk).